Tom Maurstad

Less than halfway through her five-year contract to anchor The CBS Evening News, Katie Couric is a woman on the verge of news desk breakdown. The Wall Street Journal reports that Ms. Couric may be out as soon as the next president is inaugurated.

Citing unnamed sources, in the form of "both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric," the newspaper says that CBS executives are under pressure to make a change. Apparently, there's some feeling within the company that about $15 million a year, Ms. Couric's salary, is too steep a price tag for a move that has yielded record low ratings and sinking profits for the broadcast.

While this latest scuttlebutt resembled nothing so much as authoritatively packaged gossip, it should come as no surprise to anyone. It's no news flash that Ms. Couric's reign as nightly news anchor has been foundering. After seemingly endless hype building up to her debut in 2006, she enjoyed a brief surge in ratings after which the numbers quickly dropped into the basement.

All of her early initiatives to change the broadcast, including fireside chats and personal asides, have been dropped and a traditional format has been readopted. Much of CBS' decision to bring Katie Couric onboard seems to have been designed with the media, rather than the audience, in mind. And it played great to the media, which churned out numberless stories: from morning show to nightly news, from perkiness to gravitas, the first woman to anchor the network news, on and on.

All that attention was assumed to reflect viewer interest and acceptance. But it didn't. Experts can point to the difficulties particular to CBS (its loss of affiliates, for instance), and commentators can quip that in this new online age, no one watches the networks' nightly news anymore.

But maybe the problem is as simple as it appears to be: People don't want to watch Katie Couric do that job. Maybe celeb appeal isn't as all-purpose and interchangeable as the media overlords want it to be.

Since all this upheaval speculation hinges on the presidential election, maybe there's a lesson that can be borrowed. Perhaps Ms. Couric has something in common with Sen. Hillary Clinton: It's not that people don't want a woman to be their anchor; they just don't want this woman to be their anchor.

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