#6 BY BOB SOMERSBY

WHO LOST THE PUBLIC! Why did Obama cave to Boehner? Maddow and Hayes didn’t know:  TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2011

Katie Couric’s brilliant career: Yesterday, in the New York Times, Bill Carter gave us a look at the values found at the top of the upper-end press corps.

At the top of the Times front page, Carter reviewed Katie Couric’s brilliant career as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Couric has been a ratings disaster, Carter explained. But in fairness, she did achieve some journalistic success:

CARTER: (4/11/11): As the audience totals settled into a third-place rut, dropping even behind those scored by her immediate predecessor, the interim anchor, Bob Schieffer, many of the more experimental ideas were scrapped. So was Mr. Hartman. (He now heads news for the BBC in the United States.) A longtime producer, Rick Kaplan, was brought in.

But “even though they finally returned it to a more traditional newscast, and in many ways a very fine newscast, they never convinced those people who left to come back,” Ms. Muller said.

Still, Ms. Couric scored victories. Some of her interviews made news, including one with the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez in 2007 in which he flatly denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Two years later, after he was compelled to acknowledge his steroid use, he apologized to her for lying.

Sad. Carter’s idea of a “victory” involves an interview in which Couric was lied to by a guest—a guest from the world of sports. (Couric played no role in the revelation that Rodriguez had lied.) Struck by this amazing success, Carter described more of Couric’s journalistic triumphs:

CARTER (continuing directly): She devoted time and energy to creating a popular online forum for commentaries and other coverage; the program won an Edward R. Murrow award for best newscast in 2008 and 2009, and three Emmy Awards in 2010.

Ms. Couric’s turnaround was cemented by her interview with Sarah Palin, then a vice presidential candidate, during the 2008 campaign. Ms. Palin seemed to be flummoxed by a series of direct questions, asked in low-key fashion, about things like Supreme Court decisions Ms. Palin might disagree with and which newspapers she read.

“I think she was really resurrected by the interview with Palin. It was a game changer in the campaign,” said Ms. Muller, who is on the committee that gave Ms. Couric a Walter Cronkite award for her impact on the 2008 election. “I think it really, really showed us what she is capable of. I play it for my journalism classes when I teach interviewing techniques.”

Couric won a series of insider industry prizes. For what? Carter didn’t bother to say. Meanwhile, her alleged “turnaround” was cemented by an interview in which she asked a candidate what newspapers she reads. (For the record, Couric made groaning errors during that interview, letting Palin escape with scripted evasions about her stance on abortion rights.)

Finally, note the ludicrous way Carter describes Couric’s effect on the median age of her audience. This exercise in innumeracy appeared on page one of the Times:

CARTER (continuing directly): Ms. Couric managed to do something unexpected: she lowered the median age for the program’s audience. After having the oldest network news audience under Mr. Rather, CBS now has the youngest—with a median age of 60.6. But there were not nearly enough of those younger viewers to compensate for the decline. In August 2006, Mr. Schieffer’s newscast reached seven million viewers. Last August, the newscast reached a new low of 4.89 million. And there is no evidence that the slide will stop anytime soon.

“We were going to try to bring people to the evening news who didn’t previously watch it,” Mr. Hartman said. “And it turned out to be an impossible thing to do.”

Based on the things Hartman says, it seems clear that Couric “lowered the median age” by losing large numbers of older viewers, not by attracting younger viewers. Carter slid right past that fairly obvious fact.

Couric is paid $15 million per year, Carter said, more than the slackers Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer. But what did Couricproduce for that scratch?

Carter, a man with low standards for big network stars, never quite bothers to say.