Anchor Away.(Katie Couric, CBS Evening News)

And so here we are in the latest chapter of the Katie Couric story, though perhaps it can be considered merely a continuation of the chapter that began in September of 2006, when she took over the job of anchor of the "CBS Evening News." After a blip of viewer interest at the beginning of her tenure--though "tenure" is the wrong word to use, if you think of it as a guarantee of a job for life--Couric's broadcast failed to get CBS News out of third place, behind NBC and ABC, and things never got better. Already, about a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that Couric's days were numbered. By April, after the appearance of a piece in the Wall Street Journal, headlined "CBS NEWS, KATIE COURIC ARE LIKELY TO PART WAYS," the only remaining question was what that number was. A follow-up piece in the Times included assessments of Couric's mood by people who knew her--"miserable," "stoic," "fine," "annoyed at all the stories being leaked about her," "not angry"--and quoted "a senior executive who has been close to the situation" as saying, "She's not a definite lame duck" and "Nothing is decided." Not being a definite lame duck is rather different, ain't it, from definitely not being a lame duck, and, when you hear the deceptively passive words "Nothing is decided," can't you just picture a man in a very nice business suit and an expensive tie sharpening an axe? If you can't, an Associated Press story that ran a week later might do the trick. It began, "CBS Corp. Chairman Leslie Moonves paid a surprise visit to the CBS newsroom Friday to support embattled anchor Katie Couric," and went on, "Moonves told CBS News employees that 'there are no plans for a change--today, tomorrow and into the future.' " If you recognize execuspeak when you hear it, or have ever had that hot, prickly feeling that your own days at a job are numbered, you know that such a hearty endorsement can mean only one thing: Game over.

The following week, Nielsen figures showed that the previous week's "CBS Evening News" had had the worst ratings in the show's history, which is really saying something, as that history covers sixty years; outdoing itself, the broadcast broke its own record the very next week. What's a network to do? What are all the networks to do? These, of course, are not new questions; they're not even newish. The viewership of nightly national news began to decline more than two decades ago, before the Internet and before cable news became a big deal. The erosion that has occurred on all fronts of all the news divisions, beginning in the mid-eighties, when Capital Cities bought ABC and G.E. bought NBC, is well documented, all the more fastidiously because it not only combines business and human interest but also involves media people's favorite subject: media people. Therefore, all eyes are on Couric now, to see whether she'll leave the evening news before the Presidential election, between the election and the Inauguration, or sometime after that. (The agreeable Bob Schieffer, who temped as the CBS anchor after Dan Rather was pushed out, in 2005, and is now seventy-one, recently postponed his retirement, which was supposed to start after the Inauguration.)

I've always been a morning-radio person, not a morning-TV person--I don't want to look at people when I wake up, I don't want advice about keeping children happy during long car trips, I don't want to hear about anybody's dream wedding, and I would rather not know where in the world Matt Lauer is--and so Couric, in her fifteen years as the co-star of "Today," never had a role as a welcome, reliable ray of sunshine in my life, as she did for so many people. But I thought she had a decent chance of succeeding as the anchor at CBS. By some standards, she wasn't qualified for the job (limited hard-news credentials), and, by some standards, she was (smart, mature, an old ...