Couric Anchors Final Broadcast

Politico reports

In the end,  Katie Couric’s bumpy ride as the first female solo anchor of a network evening news show, which comes to a close with Thursday night’s broadcast, turned out to be historic for different reasons than people expected.

Couric was hardly the first network news anchor to have enemies on the right, but the combination of CBS News’s political baggage, her own longstanding unpopularity with conservatives in her previous job at “Today,” and – of course - her election-altering interview with Sarah Palin, made her a symbol of right-wing anger at the mainstream media.

Deborah Potter, a former CBS News correspondent and now executive director of Newslab, called Couric “the poster child for media bashing,” but said it was the result of a number of factors beyond Couric’s control – among them, her predecessor Dan Rather’s “reporting going back to the Nixon administration” and “the advent of social media and ways to communicate that were not available when Rather was anchoring” that magnified the impact of her Palin interview.

To be sure, the Media Research Center, the conservative watchdog group, has dossiers on all three network news anchors detailing what they consider to be examples of liberal bias, but it is Couric who has come under the most criticism.

“Replacing Dan Rather in that chair, you are going to have a problem with conservatives from the get-go,” said Tim Graham, MRC’s director of media analysis.