By Stone Martindale Jun 13, 2007, 2:14 GMT
On the heels of Dan Rather's comments regarding Katie Couric to Joe Scarborough, CBS head Les Moonves claimed Rather's remarks that CBS was "tarting" up its newscast with Katie Couric (Rather's successor), were "sexist."
Les Moonves, Chief Executive Officer of CBS arrives on the first day at Allen & Company's 24th Annual Media and Tecnology Conference in Sun Valley Idaho, Tuesday July 11, 2006. EPA/PETER FOLEY
Rather, speaking by phone on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program with Joe Scarborough, said CBS had made the mistake of taking the evening news broadcast and "dumbing it down, tarting it up," and playing up topics such as celebrities over war coverage.
Rather referred to Couric as a "nice person," he elaborated, "the mistake was to try to bring the 'Today' show ethos to the 'Evening News,' and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience."
Moonves, CBS chief executive, speaking at an event in New York Tuesday morning sponsored by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, suggested that sexist attitudes were partly to blame for the declining ratings performance of Katie Couric.
“I’m sort of surprised by the vitriol against her. The number of people who don’t want news from a woman was startling,” Moonves said of the audience’s reaction to Couric, who this month delivered ratings for the CBS Evening News to a 20-year low.
CBS was hoping to feminize the demographics to a US television institution whose audience has been decimated by half in the last 25 years, reports The Financial Times.
The Financial Times reports "Linda Mason, head of standards at CBS News, last month told the network’s Public Eye blog: “I had no idea that a woman delivering the news would be a handicap,” and that the public seemed to 'prefer the news from white guys'."
“Some of our changes didn’t work,” Moonves said on Tuesday. “If TV news doesn’t want to go the way of the newspapers, which are declining rapidly, then we have to try change.”
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