The plan to save the CBS News

Drudge has a photograph of perkey Katie Couric (the new anchor of the CBS Evening News who nobody is watching) with this caption, "DRAMA SWIRLS AROUND COURIC... DEVELOPING...". There is no link.

Directly under that is this headline: CONTROVERSIAL MEDIA FIGURE PLOTS COMEBACK... DEVELOPING...

Being the skilled observer of all things media which I am I have deduced the meaning of these seemingly unrelated items.

Don Imus is being brought in by CBS to replace failed Katie Couric. The so called "Tiffany Network" is depending upon the cloud of controversy surrounding worn out has-been shock jock Imus to raise the CBS Evening News' ratings by a factor of at least 10. This should cause them to once again become at least detectable by Neilson's monitoring equipment.

Les Moonves CEO of the CBS Corporation has been rumored to have said that the key to turning the Evening News around is the ability to determine exactly how few people are actually watching the show.

I'll keep an eye on this and let you know what I find out as soon as I can.


UPDATE:

No such luck. The story turns out to be that Couric physically attacked an editor for using the word "sputum" in a script which Katie was supposed to read on the air.

UPDATE II:

Nobody comments to say that they find it the slightest bit strange that Katie Couric is driven to violence by the word sputum?

Couric continues to circle the bowl

From The Philadelphia Enquirer:

CBS executives deny it, but there's a growing feeling within the network that Katie Couric is an expensive, unfixable mistake.

So unfixable that Couric - the first woman to anchor a network nightly newscast solo - may leave CBS Evening News, probably after the 2008 presidential elections, to assume another role at the network, CBS sources say.

Despite her A-list celebrity, her $15 million salary, and a promotional blitz worthy of a Super Bowl, the former star of NBC's Today has failed to move the Nielsen needle on No. 3 Evening News since her debut seven months ago.

In a bottom-line business like television, that's a cardinal sin. Already-low morale in the news division is dropping, says a veteran correspondent there.

"It's a disaster. Everybody knows it's not working. CBS may not cut her loose, but I guarantee you, somebody's thinking about it. We're all hunkered down, waiting for the other shoe to drop."
Seven correspondents, producers and executives at CBS and other networks interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of the Couric situation.

Couric and CBS were a bad fit from the start.

"From the moment she walked in here, she held herself above everybody else," says a CBS staffer. "We had to live up to her standards. . . . CBS has never dealt in this realm of celebrity before."

You didn't have to watch her for long on the NBC morning show to realize that she had a deep left-wing bias and that she was too stupid to realize that she had a bias. And from what the insiders at NBC said about how everyone there hated working with her I can see how a good many folks at CBS might be wanting to toss her overboard.

If CBS wants to be number one in the ratings let them hire John Stossel away from ABC and make him the anchor and head of the news division so that he can rebuild it into a news organization that leans as far to the right as the other network news divisions lean to the left.

Well, not that far. Going as far to the right as the other networks go to the left would mean that all their on air personalities would have to wear SS uniforms, but you get the idea.