So Long Katie; Don't Let the Door Hit You

Katie Couric’s unhappy tenure as CBS Evening News anchor will soon end, and not a moment too soon for Nancy Franklin of the New Yorker. Couric seemed likely to succeed at the start, but she wound up ditching the qualities people liked in her and becoming a teleprompter-reading automaton. But above all, she lacked what declining network news shows need: passion.

“I don’t think that people want less news,” Franklin writes. “They want, I believe, the same kind of informed passion and doggedness that TV-news people displayed while covering Hurricane Katrina... Who knows, young people might turn on their TVs in droves if news organizations had a few choice strands of Michael Moore’s DNA in them.” (More Katie Couric stories.)