Terence F. Smith

AGASSI AGONISTES

Somehow, while I was looking the other way, Andre Agassi became the grand old man of professional tennis.

How did this happen? I still remember vividly the long hair, the denim shorts and the black shoes when Agassi won Wimbledon in 1992. I remember the blistering, two-handed service returns, the unbelievable quickness, the élan with which he attacked every game. That Andre. You know him. As entertaining a player as ever stepped on the court.

Now, suddenly, at the tennis-ancient age of 36, he has a bad back, drops out of tournaments, gets eliminated in the early rounds. The long hair has been replaced with a shaved head, the denim shorts by center-court white. With 60 singles titles to his credit, including eight majors, he has announced that the current U.S. Open — his 21st — will be his last competitive tournament. Andre, say it ain’t so.

The odds are against him as he takes on players little more than half his age. He struggled last night in a four-set opening match against Andre Pavel, but ultimately prevailed. Nonetheless, Agassi is the undisputed sentimental favorite of the over-the-hill gang, all of us older weekend players who choose to see a little of themselves in Andre and our own struggle against the clock. Tennis, after all, is a game where top players may peak in their 20’s, but many of us can play actively and enjoyably for decades more. Agassi isn’t alone at Flushing Meadows, he has the tennis geezers like myself rooting for him. Big time.

But Agassi represents something else as he approaches the end of his career. His departure marks the end of an era… the golden years when American players dominated the game. Over the last 20 years, there was always a Sampras or a Connors or a McEnroe or an Evert or a Williams sister in the finals. This year, no Americans got close to the finals at Wimbledon or the French open. The young hopefuls, like Andy Roddick and James Blake, gifted as they are, are struggling with their games, and the Williams sisters have been dogged by injury. The number one, Roger Federer, of Switzerland, aged 25, appears unbeatable. Behind him, Spain’s 20-year-old Rafael Nadal, is astonishing. The top women? They are all European and gorgeous and terrific. What they aren’t, is American.

What explains this drought? Is the American Century over? Is there some broader message here about American competitiveness in the 21st century? Some lack of moral fiber? Poor diet? Too many sugary drinks? Are we all fat and happy in our mediocrity?

I doubt it, but John McEnroe, who scores his points in the announcer’s booth these days, laments the trend and says he intends to reverse it by creating a top-quality training academy at the U.S. Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, New York. It is not an entirely new idea, but he argues that American tennis has to draw talent from the big urban areas, from the masses, not just from the privileged who can afford to move the family, the Volvo station wagon and golden retriever to a high-priced boarding school-slash-tennis factory in Florida.

I think he is on to something and I hope it works. I am sure the American talent is there somewhere. In the meantime, I’ll be pulling for Agassi to overturn the odds and finish his career on a high note by beating some of the kids, maybe all of the kids. And I know I won’t be alone

THIS COMMENTARY WAS BROADCAST ON NPR’S ALL THINGS CONSIDERED ON AUGUST 7, 2006:

OSPREYS INC.

I have been watching the ospreys from my window overlooking the Chesapeake Bay…watching them arrive in the early spring, hatch their young, conduct flight training and prepare to head south again. They provide great entertainment and a natural calendar of the seasons. Better yet, they are an environmental success story, proving that sometimes, against the odds, people can fix what they carelessly imperil in the first place.

The osprey is a splendid bird, white on the bottom, brown on top, with a sharply hooked beak and a wingspan of about five feet. Its spiked talons are perfectly designed to spear fish.

Unlike fickle humans, ospreys mate for life. But like humans who can afford it, they spend the winter in the Caribbean and further south. They come north to the Chesapeake for romance and parenthood.

These undocumented migrants usually arrive in the second week of March and immediately begin building their nests on dead trees or navigational markers — anything that stands out over the water. Creatures of inflexible habit, the same pair will return to their old nesting site year after year.

By late spring, the pair outside my window had hatched two offspring. They are diligent, protective parents, delivering fish to their young ones in the nest and screeching angrily at me when I pass too close in my motorboat. By late July, the chicks were almost the size of the adults and their survival lessons got underway.

With their parents circling nearby, the younger ospreys teetered on the edge of the nest and then, hesitantly, took their first flight, dipping dangerously towards the water for a second or two, then catching on and soaring.

Like student pilots, they practiced touch-and-goes on the water, dragging their talons briefly along the surface. When it was really hot the other day, the chicks took turns diving into the water, splashing and cooling off and then, after a prolonged struggle that frankly scared me, taking off again, shaking the water from their wings. Just this morning, I watched as one of the parents dive-bombed a great blue heron that dared to intrude into the same fishing grounds.

In another month or so, the parents will head south, leaving the chicks to follow. One day in the early fall, the younger birds will be gone too, heading some 3,000 miles to their winter playground.

In the 1960’s, if you lived on the Chesapeake, you saw fewer and fewer ospreys. Like bald eagles, they had ingested the pesticide DDT and been unable to reproduce. But common sense prevailed and DDT was banned in 1972. Since then, the ospreys have come roaring back.

The birds are everywhere now. If anything, there is an osprey housing shortage around the Chesapeake, with too few choice nesting spots. It is a joy to see them rebound. It suggests that sometimes, people can do the right thing.

STEM CELLS AND DIABETES

I broadcast the following commentary on All Things Considered on July 18, 2006, the day the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would have expanded federal funding for embroyonic stem cell research. On July 19, President Bush vetoed the bill. The legislation is dead for this year, but the argument is far from over.

*

I was recently diagnosed as a diabetic, joining millions of other Americans who have Type-2 diabetes, one of the fastest spreading illnesses in the nation today. So far, I have been able to control my blood sugar level through diet, exercise and medication. I can even enjoy a glass of wine and — mother of all evils — the occasional ice cream cone. But I am aware of the frightful consequences of this disease when it gets out of control. So I play a lot of tennis and work out, not as often as I should, I suppose, but more often than before this diagnoses.

No surprise, then, that I and many other Americans — there are an estimated 20 million Type-2 diabetics — paid special attention as the Senate addressed the emotional and politically-loaded issue of expanding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. There are no guarantees, but scientific evidence suggests that such research could provide new treatments and possibly even a cure for numerous diseases, including diabetes.

After years of covering similar debates as a journalist, I have discovered that nothing brings home a public policy issue like the possibility that it could affect you individually and intimately. You evolve very quickly from disinterested observer to participant. I not only want to benefit myself from any treatment that might emerge from embryonic stem cell research, I want my children, Elizabeth and Christopher, to share that advantage should diabetes prove to be genetic.

President Bush has repeated his opposition to this legislation, as recently as this week. He has said that in his view, such research, using the estimated 400,000 excess embryos that are currently frozen in fertility clinics, “crosses an important moral line.” He says this, despite the fact that most of these frozen embryos would otherwise be discarded.

I don’t doubt his sincerity. But I do question whether we elect our political leaders to assert their moral or religious views over scientific evidence and, polls suggest, the will of the majority.

Honest men and women can differ over this question. It is not black and white. But I have to admit my bias. I have a dog in this fight. The President has pledged to use his first veto in six years on this legislation. I hope he listens to this debate and decides to keep his veto pen in his pocket.

MORE FROM THE MIDDLE KINGDOM:

After three weeks in China — my first visit — I came away wondering: is this really a communist country?
A more thriving capitalist culture could hardly be imagined, at least in the big cities. The broad avenues are lined with stores of every description, stocked with all manner of consumer goods, high-end and low, imported and locally-made. The skyscrapers springing up in Shanghai and Beijing are crowded with new business enterprises, from Chinese start-ups to western banking giants. And, as all the world knows, China makes everything …and sells it to the rest of us.
After the hardships of the early years of the communist party’s takeover in 1949, the famine of the Great Leap Forward, and the suffering and shortages of the Cultural Revolution, the former leader Deng Xiaoping shattered socialist orthodoxy and famously declared: “To be rich is glorious.” Today’s Chinese, especially the young, have taken him at his word.
Huang Guangyu, a smiling, crew-cut 37-year-old is a case in point. The son of a peasant, he moved to the big city and founded an electronics retailer, Gome Appliance Holdings. Today he is worth an estimated $1.7 billion dollars and is considered to be China’s richest man. To the generation coming behind him, he is a hero.
His is not the only success story. China is now said to have seven billionaires, some 400 entrepreneurs worth $60 million or more and 300,000 garden-variety millionaires. Its economy has expanded at a white-hot average of 10.1 per cent annually for the last 15 years. The accounting firm Price, Waterhouse, Cooper recently forecast that China will outstrip the U.S. and become the world’s largest economy by the year 2050.
And yet the inequities are as glaring as the glitter. The income gap between urban and rural Chinese is large and growing. Some 200 million Chinese still live on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank. Corruption is endemic at every level and the pollution that is choking the big cities threatens the whole country’s economic future as well as its health.
Frankly, it all seems pretty capitalist to me. I recognize that the CCP, or Communist Party of China controls the purse strings and cracks down hard on any signs of dissent. Just ask some of the Chinese journalists who have stepped out of line.
So the country is arguably authoritarian, and undeniably socialist in some respects. But communist? Not in any fashion that Marx or Lenin or even Chairman Mao would recognize. Not China. Not today.

SOME NOTES FROM THE MIDDLE KINGDOM:

To a first-time visitor, China is simply amazing.
With its 1.3 billion people, it is so huge, so crowded, so frantic, so energetic, so driven, so confident, so determined to take its place in the world that it overwhelms your senses.
I lived in Asia for three years during the Vietnam era when China was inaccessible to an American, especially an American journalist. The best we could do was to sit in Hong Kong and speculate about what was happening on the other side of the frontier. “China watching,” it was called.
Today, of course, the doors are wide open to American tourists, American businessmen and American dollars. A three-week visit opens your eyes about the world’s most populous nation and stretches your imagination about what the future may hold.
An Australian tourist I encountered summed it up as he gazed across West Lake at teeming Hangzhou, one of China’s smaller cities with a mere six million residents. “Watch out world,” he said, “here comes China!”
Shanghai is an example of the future as envisioned by China’s planners. It is home to 20 million people. The colonial architecture of its famous waterfront, or Bund, is all but lost in a forest of new skyscrapers that have mushroomed on either side of the busy Huangpu River. Riding along the elevated freeways among the clusters of skyscrapers is like sweeping through a video game. The future seems to have arrived.
But then, take the fast elevator ride to the top of the Jinmao tower, currently the world’s fourth tallest building, and look out from the observation deck and suddenly, China’s future seems less certain. Looking west on a recent, sunny afternoon, Shanghai’s vast stand of skyscrapers faded and then disappeared in a dreadful, thick smog. The city of the future is literally choking on its own success.
Travel around the country, and there are contradictions at every turn: McDonalds and KFC outlets hard by the ancient city walls in Xian… a rice farmer standing in a paddy outside Guilin in a conical hat with a wicker basket over his shoulder. He looks like a figure out of a traditional Chinese scroll, except for the cellphone in his ear. And the billboard advertising new apartments for sale that touts them, in English, in this allegedly classless society, as “upper class.”
There are contradictions as well in the U.S. approach towards China these days. We like doing business there, but politically, does Washington see Beijing as an ally or an adversary? A trading partner or a competitor? It seems to vary from day-to-day. It is a relationship that deserves high-level attention, because, as my Australian friend put it, like it or not, “… here comes China!”

The Drobny View

Two weeks on the left coast, traveling from San Francisco to L.A., provides a breath of fresh perspective outside the Beltway. The conversation shifts from the partisan political bickering of Washington to the weather (rain, mostly,) the Adventures of Arnold in the statehouse and, of course, the ongoing debate over immigration.
But it was in Santa Monica, at a two-day conference of hedge fund managers organized by Drobny Global Advisors, that I was exposed to a genuinely different way of looking at the world.
These exceptionally bright men and (a few) women, who among them manage billions of dollars of other people’s money, try to view the world as it is, not as they think it should be or wish it to be. They are realists who set aside their personal political views and suspend judgement in an effort to take a hard-eyed look at the economies of different countries.
They are gamblers, of course, but gamblers who do a prodigious amount of research and analysis before they place their bets (or those of their clients) on the Argentine peso or the Japanese real estate market or the fluctuating price of palladium versus platinum.
At the semi-annual Drobny Global conferences, a panel of the best and brightest share with their colleagues what they call their favorite trades, their assessments of what is going up and down in the next six months or a year. There is no concern about sharing proprietary information, because if they are right, and the other hedge fund managers in the room make similar trades, everybody benefits.
It is a refreshing perspective, devoid of the triangulation and three-cushion billiard shots that characterize Washington policy debates.
On each table at the conference, was a copy of a new book, “Inside the House of Money,” by Steve Drobny, that seeks to unravel the mysteries of the hedge fund universe through interviews with some of its most accomplished practitioners. It makes fascinating reading.
The keynote of the conference was given by Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-prize winning author and UCLA professor, who took the long view in trying to assess why some societies collapse and others survive. The population of Easter Island, for example, was decimated by its own actions. They cut down all the trees, destroyed the native economy and ultimately descended into civil war, starvation and canibalism.
To succeed, Diamond argues, a society needs to be able to anticipate and perceive its major problems, separate long term trends from background noise and short-term fluctuations (think global warming,) and resolve conflicts of interest between different segments of society (think haves-versus-have nots.)
Apply those standards to the Roman empire, and its downfall was inevitable. Now apply them to the United States society today and decide for yourself whether we’ll be still be king of the mountain in a century or two.
As I say, a refreshing perspective.

Please click on the link below to learn more about Steven Drobny’s book, “Inside the House of Money”

Inside the House of Money

VOLVO VELOCITY

Everybody knows that sailboat racing is a boring spectator sport — as exciting as watching paint dry, the old cliche goes. And mostly that is true. Why then are thousands of people turning out to greet and watch the seven yachts currently competing in the around-the-world Volvo Ocean Race? The answer, I think, is that these boats and these sailors are living on the edge, literally, between survival and disaster. They have already come 25,000 miles over the last seven months through the world’s most treacherous seas at speeds of up to 40 knots, rocketing off waves 30 feet high, dodging icebergs and enduring exhuberant parties at every stop. These boats are too light and too fragile to do what they are doing — and that’s the appeal. In our seatbelted, risk-adverse, liability-protected, politically-correct, over-insured world, these seventy sailors are among the last true adventurers.

NPR Commentary
The Chesapeake Bay, Scenic and Unhealthy

Listen to this story

All Things Considered, April 13, 2006 · Commentator Terry Smith extols the beauty of the Chesapeake Bay in spring. But he is also forced to lament the bay’s sad decline.

The Edwards Lecture in Politics and History honors former Democratic Congressman Don Edwards, who represented San Jose for 32 years in the U.S. House of Representatives with uncommon commitment to civil rights, decency and the plight of the disadvantaged.

By Terence Smith

“Can you believe the news?” That’s our topic here tonight. There are two ways to read that title, of course, credulously and incredulously…as in …“Can you believe the news?”…and … “Can you believe the news?” Either way, it is a fair question.

It is a relevant and even vital question if you accept, as I do and I know Don Edwards does, that democracy functions best when its citizens know what government is doing in their name and with their tax dollars. If you accept that, and the notion that independent, fair-minded, professional news organizations are essential to keep people informed, then I would argue that we are in trouble.

We are in trouble, because of worrisome trends on two scores: what the government is doing…. And what the news business is doing to itself.

On the first score, in the wake of 9/11, government has been on a secrecy binge, drunk with the notion that in the presidentially-declared war on terrorism, more and more information must be kept from the public and the Congress. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post argued recently that government secrecy poses a greater threat to American liberties today than Al Qaida.

An exaggeration? Consider some recent headlines:

Item: In secret, without warrants and beyond the knowledge of all but a handful of members of Congress, the Bush administration has been using the national security agency to tap the phones and e-mail of American citizens. Despite all the outcry and demands for an investigation that followed this disclosure in the New York Times, this program continues.

Item: In secret and without explicit Congressional authorization, judicial review, or knowledge of the International Red Cross, the Central Intelligence Agency has been operating a network of so-called “black” prisons in foreign countries where they incarcerate third-country nationals without trial or recourse.

Item: In secret until it was recently revealed, the Bush administration has been reclassifying thousands of documents that previously had been declassified and publicly released by the State Department and other agencies. One example was a 1950 intelligence estimate, written 10 days before Chinese forces crossed into North Korea, stating that Chinese involvement was “not probable.” It was declassified years ago and published in the official State Department papers. Now it has been reclassified.

Is it embarrassing to intelligence agencies to have such a report out there? Yes. Is it a threat to our national security today? Hardly. Reclassifying such a document is the bureaucratic equivalent of trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. It would be funny, if it did not reflect a larger mentality at work in the government today.

Item: According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the Bush administration spent $1.6 billion between 2003 and 2005 on pre-packaged “news.” It signed 343 contracts with public relations firms, advertising agencies, media organizations and individuals.

Some of these you may know about: Like the $186,000 paid to conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote the merits of the “No Child Left Behind” act…. Like the millions spent by the Lincoln Group to pay Iraqi editors and journalists to publish “good news” stories about the reconstruction of Iraq …Like the so-called video news releases applauding government programs that are routinely sent out free to local television stations around the country. These have been written about, but many more of these contracts never come to light.

Again, it would be funny, if it were not so pathetic. Do we really believe that we will convince ordinary Iraqis that the war is going well with pre-packaged news reports written by Army public relations officers? News reports about their own country? As the old saying goes: “What are you going to believe? What you see with your own eyes or what I tell you is going on?”

None of these items in themselves jeopardize our democracy (although they do threaten to make us a laughing stock abroad.) But they reflect a mindset that has taken hold in the Bush administration and in some quarters in Congress that says in effect:

– The war on terror justifies violating the Geneva Convention, signed and ratified treaties on the treatment of prisoners, prohibitions against domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens and the civil rights of persons brought before our courts of law
.
– Further, it justifies to the true believers, the establishment of extra-legal military tribunals, the so-called “rendition” or secret transferring of suspects to foreign countries where they may be subject to torture and, of course, harsh treatment of prisoners held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

– Further it argues that the injury to our image abroad is acceptable collateral damage for the world’s sole remaining superpower.

– The Bush White House believes — genuinely believes — that the president can do whatever he considers necessary to protect the safety of the country and its citizens without prior approval from Congress or the courts.

– Just last week, the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, told your old committee, Don, the House Judiciary Committee, that he … “would not rule out” using secret, warrantless wiretaps to monitor phone calls and emails between American citizens within this country. Previously, of course, he said the NSA was only taping communications that originated abroad. Mr. Gonzales argued that the president has the right to expand that to calls and emails in this country. The age of Big Brother is truly here.

– What is dangerous here is the mindset, the absolute conviction in the White House that they know best. That is when important constitutional principles get set aside and vital civil liberties are abridged.

– Finally, in this atmosphere, there is a full court press underway against reporters who cover sensitive national security subjects. Prosecutors are increasingly inclined to subpoena, interrogate and, if necessary, jail reporters who resist demands to turn over their notes and identify their sources. According to the committee to protect journalists, there are currently more than two dozen reporters under subpoena or facing contempt citations around the country. The Valarie Plame and Wen Ho Lee cases are only the most notorious, the ones that get the most attention. Many others go on beneath the radar.

It was telling that the Bush administration’s first reaction to the NSA wiretapping story was to order an internal investigation into who leaked the information. Not to brief Congress, not to explain the program to the public, but to track down the leaker and then go after the leakee.

In another time and with another leadership, the Congress would be investigating these developments, to say nothing of the use and abuse of intelligence prior to the Iraq war. Independent commissions would be empanelled. Reports would be delivered and made public. Names would be named

If Don Edwards were in Congress today, or if people like him chaired the relevant committees, our system of checks and balances might actually check and balance. But when one party controls the White House and Capitol Hill, it is a different story.

*

Now to the second worrisome trend, namely, what news organizations are doing to themselves. Back in the 1960s when “swinging London” was the home of the Beatles and ever-shorter mini-skirts, it was said that Britain was going “giggling into the sea.”

I fear something similar is happening in the news business today. Serious news is being shortchanged and crowded out by the frivolous and downright silly. More and more news broadcasts provide what is cynically known as “infotainment.”

Why? The reason has to do with dollars and cents. Newspapers, network news divisions, cable news networks, even the news magazines are being buffeted by a perfect storm of economic pressure, consolidation of ownership, fragmentation of audience and self-inflicted ethical crises. A new study by the project for excellence in journalism describes what it calls “a seismic transformation” taking place in the media landscape.

A few statistics make the case: Newspapers around the country are closing, being sold off and cutting editorial staff. A total of 2,100 newspaper jobs were eliminated in 2005 alone, 3,500 since the year 2000. Circulation is declining, advertising is being lost to the Internet and shareholders, used to sky-high returns, are demanding a greater reward for their investment.

The best example of that, of course, is here in San Jose, where the Knight-Ridder management decided it had no choice but to sell itself to the highest bidder. So the Mercury News and the 31 other papers in the chain went on the block, were snapped up by McClatchy, which is turning around and selling off a dozen piecemeal, including the Merc. Did Tony Ridder have the ability to resist when the largest shareholders insisted he sell? He says he did not.

Moreover, this is a national phenomenon, despite the fact that publicly-held newspaper companies returned 20.5 cents on the dollar in 2004, compared with 11.4 cents on the dollar for the 500 companies in the Standard & Poor’s index. Twenty percent profit apparently is not enough.

The net result is a nationwide reduction in news-gathering. We may have more news outlets than ever, with thousands of Internet sites and millions of bloggers, but we have fewer and fewer reporters on the street, less and less actual digging into the affairs of government and business.

An especially threatened species is the major, big city newspaper. In Philadelphia, for example, another Knight Ridder town, the number of working reporters out gathering the news on any given day has declined from 500 to 220 in the last 25 years. The two major papers are both on the block.

Print is not the only sector that is hurting. Network evening news ratings declined six percent in the last year and the number of network correspondents is a third lower than it was in the mid-1980s, when I first went to CBS News. The major broadcast network news divisions are no longer worldwide news-gathering organizations. They are news-packaging organizations. Increasingly, they take in footage from a variety of sources and package it for 30-minute evening news broadcasts that include about 20 minutes of actual news content. Very often the correspondent narrating the piece is miles or countries or even a continent away from the scene of the story.

Incidentally, Katie Couric is a fine addition to CBS News in my view, and I expect her to succeed as the first solo woman in the male-dominated world of network anchors. But it is not reasonable to expect her to single-handedly reverse an industry-wide trend.

The median prime-time audience for cable news is up four percent over the last year, according to the project on excellence in journalism report. But most of that is attributable to the increase in Fox News. The project study faults cable for focusing relentlessly on a handful of breaking stories, creating what it called “an odd hyperbole in which anchors endeavor to create a sense of urgency over small things.”

Natalee Hollaway is an example. She is a pretty young woman who disappeared on vacation in Aruba. But she is only one of thousands of missing-persons cases in this country at any given point. Cable news, in its hunger for audience and its desperation to fill 24-hours-a-day, elevates her sad story to national crisis status.

Another recent and worrisome development, in my view, is the growth of “pseudo-news,” which is to say made-up news, or opinion masquerading as news. Bill O’Reilly is the chief practitioner and profiteer in this field, but he is not alone.

O’Reilly and others offer a kind of advocacy programming, a journalism of assertion in the guise of news that is designed to reinforce peoples’ biases. More and more today Americans seek out and watch news that reflects their preconceptions. They favor that which confirms and conforms to what they already believe.

Is it really surprising that surveys show that a significant percentage of Fox viewers believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on 9/11? They absorb that from the innuendo that is implicit in the comments of national leaders and presented as straight news by Fox.

What else is the implication of the oft-repeated suggestion about the war in Iraq that “we are fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here?” It plays on peoples’ worst fears and sense of insecurity.

Beyond the cutbacks and the pseudo-news, media organizations have suffered in recent years from self-inflicted wounds, from the Jayson Blair fabrication scandal at the New York Times to Jack Kelly making up stories in USA Today to Judy Miller’s deeply erroneous articles about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. There has been no shortage of ethical and professional failures in the media.

The bottom line of these worrisome trends, of the government’s aggressive attitude on secrecy and the internal problems of news organizations themselves is that the public’s flow of reliable information is jeopardized. You are right when you wonder whether you are being told the truth. You are right when you wonder whether the truth is being manipulated for political advantage. I know that concerns Don Edwards and I think it should concern us all.

So what is the answer to the question we started with: Can you believe the news? Yes –some of the time. But don’t take it for granted.

The extraordinary coverage and attention generated by Katie Couric’s move to the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News is precisely the kind of buzz that the CBS managers, Leslie Moonves and Sean McManus, sought in the first place. When Moonves famously said of the CBS News division that he “wanted to blow up the whole building,” he meant he wanted to shake the institution out of the doldrums and downward spiral it has been in for the last decade or more.
This appointment will accomplish that. Katie’s arrival in September will bring in new people and ideas to a broadcast that has enjoyed some rejuvenation in the last year with Bob Schieffer at the helm, but is still third in the ratings.
Having known Katie for more than two decades, back to the days when she was a national correspondent for Today, I have no doubt that she will do a fine job as anchor. She has the background, intelligence and practical experience necessary for the job. She is also remarkably at ease in front of the camera and able to establish a personal rapport with the audience.
Katie has another great asset as she aproaches this challenge that she may not yet fully appreciate. Rome Hartman, the veteran CBS producer who was recently named executive producer of the Evening News, is one of the best in the business. He is already producing a more newsy, thoughtful broadcast — you can sense it in the story selection and pacing. Katie would be wise to keep him in place.