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She's tanned, she's rested, she's ready. OK, that's a remnant from the Tricky Dick Nixon era, but it also applies to Katie Couric as she prepares to make history Tuesday as the first solo female anchor for a major broadcast network.
It has been more than three months since she signed off NBC's "Today" to jump to the "CBS Evening News" anchor chair. When she hasn't been out beating the drums to critics and focus groups, she's been recharging her batteries. "I found that sleep is very underrated," said the woman who had to answer a 4 a.m. wakeup call for 15 years. "It also was a great time for me to relax and spend some quality time with my children and just kind of completely unwind."
Now she's going back to work under the most severe scrutiny any anchor has ever faced. Her male counterparts routinely have their work closely evaluated. Couric, 49, faces those assessments as well as extraneous nonsense, such as what she is wearing and how she styles her hair.
She bristles at this inequity. She challenged a writer on the summer press tour to ask Charlie Gibson what he wears. (The writer subsequently accepted the dare, to the amusement of fellow critics and the consternation of Gibson.)
Nevertheless, Couric knows CBS isn't paying her $15 million a year because she reads teleprompters well. In addition to her journalistic skills, the network bought her personality and charisma, which includes how she looks. Couric's evolving hairstyles were a big part of her NBC farewell. Gibson's were not when he left "Good Morning America" to anchor ABC's "World News."
Couric hopes she can wean the audience from the superficial toward the significant. "Obviously there is interest because the person who is in front of the camera, introducing segments and doing interviews, is the mainstay of the newscast. But I think people are more interested in the actual content and substance of what they're hearing."
Even more upsetting to her is the suggestion that she lacks the gravitas - whatever that is - to fill a network anchor chair. "It's almost (assumed that) if you do fun stuff well, you can't be serious," she said. "Because ("Today") has such a variety of pieces and you are asked to do a variety of things, sometimes people forget that I have done a lot of serious things."
Perhaps the most serious came on Sept. 11, 2001. "Today" was still on the air when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. She competently and efficiently anchored NBC's non-stop coverage for several hours. (Couric will make her prime-time CBS News debut on Wednesday with a one-hour special tied to the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. "Five Years Later: How Safe Are We?" will air at 10 p.m. EDT, focusing on what the government is doing to prevent future attacks and how anxiety affects Americans.)
Her role as a gender pioneer is "an added honor," she said, but it has been overstated. It's more a product of circumstance than discrimination. "It's really the paucity of occasions this particular job has made itself available. These seats have been occupied for very lengthy periods. They don't become available that often."
The face of the anchor will not be the only new look. "For competitive reasons, we're not going to give away a lot of trade secrets but I think we have some really good ideas," CBS News President Sean McManus said.
"Our goal is to have people not talk about the (new) set, graphics or music, but to talk about the broadcast. But I know everyone's going to look at the set. It's not going to be wildly modernistic or look like a spaceship. It's going to be much more contemporary but it's going to be comfortable. It's going to allow Katie to use different areas, perhaps standing sometimes. It has different areas we can utilize depending on what kind of news we're presenting. It has an area for Katie to do in-person interviews with correspondents or guests. It's modern, it's clean, but it also has a lot of traditional elements."
There will be a prominent place on the show, if not the set, for Bob Schieffer, who is surrendering the anchor desk after doing yeoman duty since Dan Rather left in March 2005. The "CBS Evening News" is the only network show to add viewers during the past year, improving by about 300,000 per night.
"We have a new arrangement with Bob, which will guarantee he will have a regular role," McManus said. "Both Katie and I very much wanted him to do it. He will be a regular commentator from Washington, giving his views on the news of the day."
McManus is confident Couric is up to all the demands of her new job.
"At the end of the day, what's going to make our broadcast really good, and what's going to make Katie Couric not only a good anchor of election coverage or the next national crisis, is not her celebrity but her talents as a reporter and an anchor, which are clearly self-evident after the last 15 years. Her celebrity is drawing an enormous amount of attention to our program. In the end, all that attention could be wasted if we don't put on a show that the American people respect and like."
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CBS EVENING NEWS
6:30 EDT weeknights
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Tom Jicha: tjicha@sun-sentinel.com
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(c) 2006 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
