COURIC PICKS UP SPEED
By ADAM BUCKMAN
And without them, you get a much better Katie Couric.
It was a no-brainer to me, a critic blessed with 20-20 hindsight: Get rid of the things that give naysayers reasons to naysay.
That meant chucking that idiotic "freeSpeech" segment in which "real people" such as Rush Limbaugh got an opportunity to address CBS News viewers for 90 seconds. Everyone thought that thing was a joke from Day One.
It also meant keeping Katie in her seat - no more walking around, leaning casually on her desk or sitting cross-legged on the floor. Actually, that didn't happen, but it would not have been unexpected given the direction the new Katie-cast was going.
CBS seems also to have done away with Katie sitting chair to chair for a chat with some interviewee - a time-wasting exercise for a show lasting all of 21 minutes.
Maybe they still have these chats or even an occasional "freeSpeech" segment (CBS insists it's not officially dead), but neither was featured in the first two newscasts of this week or the last two of last week.
I watched all four of them yesterday (thanks to cbsnews.com) to assess how Katie and the "CBS Evening News" are doing as the new executive producer, Rick Kaplan, takes over.
Kaplan started his new job on Monday, so it cannot be determined what sort of schemes he'll devise for perking up the ratings.
Hopefully, he will refrain from the kinds of contrivances that got Katie off to such a horrible start in the first place because the gimmick-free newscasts I just watched were great.
I liked Richard Schlesinger's story about the students at a Vermont military academy who produced a documentary about Vermont's war dead; Katie's story about a Harlem doctor fighting for improved healthcare for the poor; Allen Pizzey's story about the electricity shortage in Baghdad; and Mark Phillips' story about a Danish island whose residents use no fossil fuels.
Watching these four newscasts reinforced what I've always felt about the three nightly newscasts: Pound for pound, they're all pretty much the same.
Why CBS - whose standards are just as high as NBC and ABC - trails the other two is a mystery.
