Katie Couric, who left the Today Show to take over as the anchor on the CBS Evening News has found out that she may not be America’s Sweetheart anymore. 

The ratings are in and after an initial surge due to all the hype she has settled into third place which is where the program was before CBS committed some $60 million dollars to boost their ratings.  And the ratings have risen by 6 percent overall and 23 percent in the 18-49 age demographic, but she is still third with the advertiser coveted 25-54 group and trails NBC’s Brian Williams by 1.5 million viewers and ABC’s Charles Gibson by 700,000 viewers a night.  Not exactly a tight race.

I don’t think the ratings improvement will be enough for CBS to justify the money they spent on luring Katie from her morning perch and the format of the program which gives time to fluffier issues apparently isn’t working very well either.  I’m not sure that Katie realizes that she only has about 22 minutes of actual airtime and spending 3 minutes on some feature story isn’t what attracts viewers to a news program.

America gave her a chance to show she could be a serious newswoman.  They have now voted and decided that they liked her better when she was perky and not so serious.

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