New York — THE new theme song that will open the "CBS Evening News" tonight is by the same composer who did the score for "Field of Dreams," so perhaps it's appropriate for Katie Couric to recall a sentiment from that movie when asked about her hopes of attracting more viewers to the third-place broadcast.
"If we build it, they will come," she said with a grin.
And after months of speculation, followed by anticipation, Couric and CBS have finally built it.
Few doubt that Couric's debut on the newscast this evening will inflate the audience in the short-term. From the first rumors that the longtime morning anchor was considering making the jump to CBS, her move has been covered with the kind of intense scrutiny and speculation usually reserved for prospective presidential candidates.
"With all the attention given to not just us, but Charlie [Gibson] and Brian [Williams], I think there's been more written about this time period in the last three months than probably in history," said CBS News President Sean McManus.
But it remains to be seen what effect Couric -- who will be the first sole female anchor of a network evening newscast -- will have on the genre, which has been plagued by steady audience erosion for several decades.
In the last year, overall viewership of the three broadcasts has ebbed amid a period of remarkable upheaval behind the anchor desks, one that appears to have finally drawn to a close with Charles Gibson's appointment to ABC's "World News" in May and Couric's arrival at CBS. By the end of the season, NBC remained in the lead, but its audience was down about 5% and ABC had dropped 9%, while CBS had edged upward -- the only newscast to do so.
Executives at all the networks say they hope to benefit from the recent wave of publicity about the new matchup in the evening. But television news analysts warn that reversing the trend in viewership is a difficult proposition, especially during a time when people increasingly seek news and information from other sources.
"I don't think it would be a surprise if the amount of ink spilled on this floated the audience upward" initially, said Deborah Potter, a former correspondent for CBS and CNN who runs NewsLab, a Washington-based nonprofit journalism training and research center. "But I don't think people's lives have changed, and the amount of time they have to spend hasn't changed."
