Dream on, Leslie Moonves!

So says TV Guide, long considered the definitive organ for behind-the-scenes chatter about TV. Specifically, Jeff Zucker, Leslie Moonves' counterpart at NBC, told the Television Critics' Association that his network has already started talking to Katie Couric about her next contract--presumably in the same interview in which Mr. Zucker told the TCA that he "couldn't believe" that CBS News would do anything as stupid as the Killian Memoranda segment, considering the rather (pardon the pun) thin sourcing of the memos. The buzz at TV Guide is that NBC will simply not allow CBS to unhook Katie Couric. She already pulls down $16 million a year and will likely get a big raise. (Hat Tip: RatherBiased.com, or rather a reader there who left the link to this article in a comment on another article in the RatherBiased news blog.)

Two things:

1. I always did think that CBS were out of their minds to talk about signing Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer to do the evening news. These two are morning hostesses, and each one has had a hand in turning her respective morning show into something that plainly de-emphasizes news. (Even Fox and Friends, the Fox News Channel equivalent, at least tries to stick to subject matter related to the news, with their choice of interviews, which Today, Good Morning America, and The CBS Morning Show do not do.) Either woman would have been woefully out-of-place in the evening slot--and Leslie Moonves' rumored plan (if it is a plan--I'd say that all the breath-bating about that is simply the equivalent of asking what Moonves thinks he's doing) to turn the Evening News into an Evening Show won't wash, either. And now it looks as though neither woman will take the gig anyway.
2. The salaries that people pull down for doing the news--or playing sports, or acting in a movie, or whatever--are outrageous. Even the President doesn't get paid that amount of money--and in fact Bill Clinton would have given his eyeteeth even to get graft that would amount to as much as Katie Couric gets "legitimately." Why do we continue to support this entertainment establishment? What if NBC put on the Today show and nobody bothered to watch anymore?

Today, Norman Mailer, writing in Parade, says that TV ads should go, and people should pay directly for TV. How much does anyone suppose that Katie Couric would make if Today were forced to go to pay-per-view with no commercial interruptions? Nor would this be as technically difficult as you might think. The cable providers could easily come up with several tiers of flat-fee viewership plans, and negotiate with program content providers--including all the traditional networks--for deals to pay them up-front with revenues derived from residential subscriptions. With the new digital-cable techniques, the cable guys could easily track what you're watching, and that in turn would determine what they'd be willing to pay the networks for any particular program at any particular time of day. In fact, they could offer you a smorgasbord of first-string channels and let you pick and choose which channels you are willing to pay for, and block the rest--thus putting all channels on the same footing as Home Box Office and Showtime. In this kind of format, I am convinced that Fox News Channel would blow the networks out of the water for good--because Fox News, together with the two C-SPAN's, The Weather Channel, and maybe a new type of all-local channel, would be all you'd need.

And Katie Couric? Let her compete with "Adrienne," the semi-regular on the Home Shopping Network who hawks Signature Club A cosmetic products for women--and I think "Adrienne" manages to have better camera presence, anyway, because at least she's honest about what she's doing.

(The above is not intended as a commercial endorsement of Signature Club A or the Home Shopping Network. Which is to say, they didn't pay me to say any of the above. Furthermore, the views expressed on this blog are my own, and no one else's.)