Sense and Sensibility

Since that “jump the shark” moment, Couric has dog-paddled her way back to some respectability. Her Sarah Palin interview was among the most news-making moments of the last presidential campaign, revealing that Palin could not recall a single newspaper or book that she had read. (In a twist of irony so ridiculous as to be sublime, Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” is now at the top of The New York Times Bestseller lists.)

Television loves a cat fight and media critics (most of them male) have clucked over the Sawyer-Couric rematch as being somewhere between Tanya and Nancy and Alexis and Krystal. Nobody really wanted to see the avuncular Gibson take on the dapper Brian Williams in a mud-wrestling match, but evidently the Betty and Veronica myth dies hard. Let the girls have at it.

The irony of all of this is that 33 years after Barbara Walters first took to the nightly news anchor desk with the surly Harry Reasoner, the evening news is less newsworthy than ever. On a good night, the best you can hope for is a little Tabasco sauce on Brian Williams’ tie.

Most people today are too busy wrenching off their own ties or slipping out of their low-heeled pumps to even consider turning on the tube at 6:30 p.m.. Many of those are lucky enough to have enough time to pre-heat the oven. Because the news is everywhere [--] scrolling across your cell phone like an Indiglo caterpillar, blathering away at you in the doctor’s office and the gas pump, the evening news has devolved from “must-see” TV to a “maybe-if-I-have-a-second” afterthought.

Most of us get our news from local TV, which is to real news what Salisbury Steak is to Angus Porterhouse. In 1980, nearly 52 million Americans watched the nightly news. Today, the evening news leader, NBC, is lucky to grab a hair under 10 million.

For advertisers, the big bucks are in the morning shows, which have become such a vehicle for pumping products they’re only a 1-800 number away from infomercials. The only topic the morning shows seem to like better than virtual catalog shopping is missing children.

Here’s a typical morning’s headlines on the “Today” show’s web page: “Sarah Jessica Parker ’shocked’ at Hugh Grant’s nails” and “Missing Mom’s husband acts ‘abnormal.’”

The pedigreed Sawyer (Cornell, Georgetown) initially seemed like she was slumming it on “GMA,” like a night-club chanteuse expected to lead round-robin sing-a-longs at pre-K, but she was a real gamer. She and co-host Robin Roberts seemed to have genuine chemistry, an authenticity in stark relief to the forced chumminess of the “Today Show,” where they’d like us to believe that Meredith Vieira and Ann Curry go off and have pedicures together.

Nothing has been the same on morning television since Couric left. She had the empathy, sincerity and, alas, perkiness that all of us should have at 7 in the morning. But her charm has not translated well to the evening news, where she seems like the chirpy sorority gal forced to button down and get serious for her first job at a law firm. Sawyer has always seemed a natural for evening, with a poise and dignity finely calibrated to the seriousness of the task. Her overdue capture of the anchor chair is symptomatic of a news business still male-dominated.

While media critics have been licking their chops over the Diane v. Katie matchup, the real story is that the nightly news is Williams’ to lose. Couric’s CBS lurks hopelessly in the cellar with scarcely a spider hole of hope. NBC leads the nightly newscasts by nearly a million viewers. It is king of the evenings just as it has been king of the morning, deserving or not.

If Sawyer can muster the audience to topple Williams from his throne, that will be news only in the sense of The Wall Street Journal besting USA Today in the circulation wars. When the world has stopped paying attention, any victory is pyrrhic at best.

c. Republican American, 2009.