For months I’ve been telling people that “The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” isn’t as bad as I once thought it was.
Damning with faint praise, sure, but you have to remember where it all started: too much walking and talking, some ill-considered “Free Speech,” and a picture of Suri Cruise.
Nowadays, as I catch up with the evening news by podcast the next morning, I’m finding it’s Couric I turn to first, not last.
It’s an election year, and with two men and a woman now in the lead in the race for president, the two men and the woman back at the networks’ anchor desks are doing their best to put their stamps on the coverage, something CBS has done particularly effectively.
As corny as it first sounded, I’ve come to admire Couric’s “Primary Questions” series, in which she asked each of what used to be 10 leading candidates for president the same questions on topics ranging from infidelity to losing their tempers.
Not that most answers have been revelatory. No one’s explicitly confessed, as Jimmy Carter did to Playboy, to having “committed adultery in my heart.” And I’m fine with that.
But a lot could be read into whether a candidate bothered to answer at all, or merely segued into a canned stump speech, and in cases where candidates don’t differ so much on the issues, it might even help to know what book — other than the Bible — they’d consider essential to have at hand as president.
Or maybe not, since Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Rodham Clinton both named “The Federalist Papers.”
Though ABC’s Charles Gibson and NBC’s Brian Williams bring plenty of enthusiasm for the political process to their newscasts, it may be that very enthusiasm for the process that sometimes comes through too strongly. As someone who’s loved politics since childhood, I get drawn into the horse race, too.
But when it’s Williams talking with Tim Russert, it sometimes feels more like “SportsCenter” than like news to me.
So although I occasionally still wince when Couric makes one of her patented real-person remarks while chatting with a correspondent — Couric’s evening-news persona is a work in progress — I think she may be speaking for more real people than her competitors, even if those real people aren’t all bothering to watch.
I also happen to prefer some of the people she’s speaking to. Jeff Greenfield, that nomadic talking head, has found his way back to CBS as senior political analyst after stints at CNN and ABC.
I’ve always liked Greenfield, who’s smart enough to occasionally remind us there are things he — and we — don’t yet know. It’s an approach that, after Iowa and New Hampshire, should have become universal among pundits, but somehow hasn’t.
It was Greenfield who on Dec. 31, talking about how few Iowans actually tend to participate in the caucuses, compared with the numbers who vote in New Hampshire, asked: “If, in fact, only a handful of voters decides who wins and loses, will the media have the restraint not to declare winners and losers based on so small a number of participants?” Um, no.
