For Couric, an Uphill March
Third-Place Anchor Adjusts Her Role

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 7, 2008

She is trailing in a highly competitive contest against her male rivals, is occasionally covered in a condescending way and faces predictions that she'll be forced out of the race.

Katie Couric understands what Hillary Clinton is going through.

"I identify with her to a certain extent because we share a gender," the CBS anchor says. "I'm sensitive to coverage that can be very subtly stacked against her, maybe a headline that has a little more snarkiness about her. . . . I understand that kind of coverage because I've experienced it myself."

After a rough 19 months since making the leap from "Today" superstardom to Walter Cronkite's old chair, Couric has been keeping a relatively low profile lately. But she has continued to work for the cause of improved treatment of cancer, the disease that claimed her husband, Jay Monahan, a decade ago and her sister Emily, a Virginia state senator who died in 2001.

On Saturday she will be in Charlottesville to help the University of Virginia break ground for a $74 million Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center, funded by both the state and private donations.

"I really want to have a lasting monument to my sister's contribution to the state and her desire to see cancer patients treated in a comprehensive, holistic way," Couric says.

The "CBS Evening News" is far more traditional now than when Couric made her much-hyped debut in the fall of 2006, serving up new features and interviews with the likes of Michael J. Fox that ran as long as nine minutes. In fact, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says that last year Couric spent much less time on interviews with outside guests (178 minutes) than did NBC's Brian Williams (371 minutes) and ABC's Charlie Gibson (308 minutes).

Couric appears more comfortable on the evening news set these days, but the sense of excitement and experimentation that she brought to the 60-year-old genre has long since faded. That eases the pressure on her but makes it harder for her to distinguish herself.

"When we reprogrammed the show and tried to give it a faster pace and make it newsier -- though I thought it was newsy before -- there was an effort to scale back on those interviews, because unfortunately they take time," she says.

Some of her interviews, says Couric, have been replaced by her field reports from primary states during the campaign. Last week she did a piece on misstatements by presidential candidates and another on the vice presidential selection process -- stories that at other networks might have been done by correspondents.

In one series of segments, Couric asked the candidates about personal subjects, from losing their temper to -- most notably -- whether they believed infidelity should be an issue in the race.

"I thought it was a perfectly legitimate question," Couric says, while admitting a slight hesitation in posing it. "We asked it in a way that didn't say, 'Have you ever cheated on your spouse?' . . . We were getting to core character issues, getting a little bit of a window on their psyches and what makes them tick."

Iraq has faded dramatically on all the network newscasts, although it made a brief comeback late last month after the 4,000th American died in the war and renewed fighting broke out in Basra. According to the Washington-based journalism project, the network newscasts devoted 26 percent of their airtime to the war in the first three months of 2007; that has plunged to 5 percent so far this year.

"It's a conundrum," says Couric, who reported from Iraq last year. "Just because people have tired of this war doesn't mean we should stop covering it. You wrestle with it on a nightly basis. Of course, people are obsessed with the [presidential] campaign right now. That's something we have to be on guard against, neglecting Iraq. It's obviously hugely important for this country, even if people have slightly lost interest."

On the political front, Couric believes the imbalance in the way the Democratic candidates are portrayed stems in part from some reporters "who are predisposed not to like the Clintons." But she says the coverage has evened out recently, thanks to a pair of comedy skits that portrayed journalists as being in the tank for Barack Obama. " 'Saturday Night Live' did have a big impact on the media," she says.

Couric has chafed at being unable to moderate a presidential debate this season, even as Williams (who has MSNBC as an outlet) has done five and Gibson will moderate his third such event next week. Network executives see such a debate as a way to boost Couric's credibility in the political arena.

With CBS Chairman Les Moonves taking the lead, the network has offered a 90-minute North Carolina debate on April 27, after "60 Minutes." Sen. Clinton has accepted the invitation, but so far Sen. Obama has not. Couric's only scheduled debate was canceled in December after CBS staffers threatened to join the Hollywood writers' strike.

Couric's success is measured by viewers, not voters, and on that score the highest-paid anchor is a clear also-ran. She is averaging 6.7 million viewers a night for the season that began in September, well behind Williams (9 million) and Gibson (8.8 million). Couric prefers to take the long view, noting that NBC's Tom Brokaw languished in second place for more than a decade before securing the top spot.

"I've never really judged my worth by ratings. It was nice to be number one on the 'Today' show, but to me it was more important to do a good show. Our broadcast, I think, is of really good quality. Hopefully more people will come to it. I feel really good about the job I'm doing every single night."

Her celebrity is a double-edged sword, putting the 51-year-old Couric on more magazine covers than the other anchors but also generating more gossipy items about whom she is dating. That, for the moment, seems to have died down. "I think people have pretty much lost interest in my love life," she says.

Perhaps Couric's best performance of the year never appeared on the air. It is easy to forget the infectious sense of humor that made her the queen of morning television, and it was on display on the night of the New Hampshire primary -- outtakes of which were leaked to comedian and commentator Harry Shearer and made their way to YouTube.

As Couric was being made up outdoors, she tweaked one of her predecessors, Dan Rather, by pretending to be undecided whether to wear her overcoat open or closed, a decision he was once seen wrestling with on a similar bootleg tape. She joshed with her crew in sometimes salty language about Rather deserving "a little payback" and, playing off his public blast that CBS had tarted up his former newscast, declared: "This tart is ready to go!"

Was Couric embarrassed that her private mocking became a viral video?

"I thought it was funny," she says. "It's really hard to show that side of my personality on the evening news, and that's a frustration for me."

Going Too Far

Air America, the liberal radio network, has suspended host Randi Rhodes indefinitely for what it called "abusive, ad hominem language" about public figures. That corporate language doesn't quite capture what Rhodes said in a video that surfaced last week.

The expletive-filled rant took place before a San Francisco audience at a March 22 event for an Air America affiliate station, and the appearance by Rhodes, a Barack Obama supporter, was promoted on Obama's Web site. Rhodes has drawn past criticism for joking about the assassination of President Bush.

During her routine, Rhodes called Geraldine Ferraro "David Duke in drag," said that Dick Cheney moved to Wyoming "so he would never have to see a black guy or a Jew" and called Hillary Clinton, among other things, "a big [expletive] whore." Some of the other ugly comments are unprintable, but the inevitable video has been posted on YouTube.