Katie Couric didn’t really need Walter Cronkite to introduce her at the opening of the newscast, saying with his familiar gravelly voice, “This is the ‘CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.’ ” The network’s new face handled her first day at the anchor desk — a shinier, lighter one — calmly and competently.
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Actually, the woman who stood out most last night was CBS News’s chief foreign-affairs reporter, Lara Logan, an experienced and unusually pretty war correspondent who took a daring trip into Taliban-held territory in Afghanistan wrapped in a black chador. “Am I allowed to smile?” she asked her surly Mujahaddin escorts. Ms. Logan contrasted the Taliban’s ascendancy with old footage from 2004, when Ms. Logan had visited American troops in control of the same area and wore a flak jacket and Chanel sunglasses.
That segment displayed Ms. Couric’s commitment to covering foreign news as anchor and managing editor. But Ms. Logan’s arresting screen presence also helped deflect attention from Ms. Couric’s much anticipated — and scrutinized — appearance (fitted white jacket over a black sheath dress).
And Ms. Couric was subdued throughout the broadcast, perhaps a little spooked by all the fuss over her appointment. The network’s readiness campaign — the focus groups, the listening tour of America, the wardrobe questions — prompted massive attention and some snickering. CBS executives complained that Ms. Couric is being held to a cattier standard.
In an interview with Harry Smith on the CBS morning show, Ms. Couric delicately allowed that she is partly a victim of “residual sexism.” CBS was perhaps the worst offender, however. The network recently doctored a publicity picture of Ms. Couric to make her appear longer and slimmer — something it didn’t do for Bob Schieffer.
American womanhood does not rise or fall on Ms. Couric’s success. She is the first woman to serve as the solo anchor of a major network evening news broadcast, but plenty of women have filled in as solo anchors. Mostly, Ms. Couric is the first true celebrity to anchor a network news show. Tom Brokaw was well-known when he went from “Today” to the NBC evening news, as is Charles Gibson, who recently left “Good Morning America” to be ABC’s evening-news anchor. Neither is nearly as high wattage. No other news person, not even the glamorous Diane Sawyer, appears as often in People or are stalked as relentlessly by gossip columnists and entertainment shows. And Ms. Couric revels in the show-business spotlight — whether as the focus of an episode of “The E! True Hollywood Story” or performing cameos on “Will and Grace” and “Austin Powers in Goldmember.”
CBS is not paying her an estimated $15 million a year for being a woman — it’s the cost of hiring the biggest star. And that factor affects CBS’s evening news far more than a new format, new theme music or a redesigned set.
Ms. Couric greeted viewers informally with the words “Hi, everyone.” Her armchair-to-armchair interview with the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman was a conflation of the new role and the old one at “Today,” but Ms. Couric said little in their conversation, interjecting questions like, “How do you do that?” She was also humble about her closing line, asking viewers to write in with suggestions for a sign-off other than “that’s the way it is” or “courage.”
The first show was certainly a work in progress. Hard news was followed by the softest of features, including a first look at the cover of Vanity Fair showing Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s long-unseen baby, Suri (adorable). Perhaps worried that the segment would look too frivolous, Ms. Couric introduced it with an old clip of a 1949 CBS newscast with Douglas Edwards showing a baby picture of Prince Charles — as if there were a grand tradition of baby pictures at the Tiffany network.
Infants must be in vogue, though. ABC also showed baby pictures to mark Chris Cuomo’s first day at the news desk of “Good Morning America,” alongside a new weatherman, Sam Champion.
Rosie O’Donnell made a far brasher debut on “The View,” where she took the seat of Meredith Vieira at the head of a glass table on the show’s new, sleeker set (the recently deposed Star Jones Reynolds has been airbrushed from ABC history).
“My name is Meredith Vieira, and welcome to ‘The View,’ ” is how Ms. O’Donnell began, and quickly usurped the Alpha role. She told funny, sometimes ribald stories, interrupting at will and spoke often and openly about her lesbian relationship and four adopted children. It was a vivid contrast to Ellen DeGeneres, who never alludes to her personal life on her talk show.
When Elizabeth Hasselbeck, the Zeppo Marx of the foursome, said she donned a bathing suit to take a bath with her baby daughter, Ms. O’Donnell went wide-eyed at her prudery, and recalled that when she took a more natural bath with her daughter, the child asked, “When do I get my fur?”
Ms. O’Donnell announced a surprise gift for the audience — a two-day cruise on a Royal Caribbean liner, and then made fun of the sponsor’s lengthy promotional segment. “You better give us something more than a two- day cruise for that hour, minute-long package,” she said. “The audience has cramps in their arms from clapping.”
Joy Behar tried to hold her own by making a joke at Ms. O’Donnell’s expense, and was soundly pushed back. The comedian looked at the camera and said waggishly, “And you all thought I was going to have problems with Elizabeth.”
Ms. O’Donnell is the first boisterously gay host of a major daytime talk show, but that doesn’t make her a touchstone of tolerance. Ms. Couric’s ratings at CBS will not be a test of feminism; they will be a measure of viewers’ flexibility.
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