James Poniewozik

"Expressing your opinion is very American," announces Couric, earnestly introducing tonight’s freeSpeech segment and sounding like she’s introducing a student-council-election-speeches assembly. Morgan Spurlock gives a decently funny piece on how the public discourse focuses on the extremes of ideology, ignoring the folks in the middle.

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"The folks at Chevron felt like they won the lottery!" Thus Couric introduces a segment on the reported new Gulf of Mexico oil find. I know Couric is a neighborly type, and that’s part of her appeal, but… "the folks"? I can’t wait to hear what’s up with "those cutups over at the Dept. of Homeland Security" or "those Halliburton dudes."

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First advertiser: Vytorin anti-cholesterol medication. But there’s also one of those Dr. Scholl’s "Are you gellin’?" commercials, which probably qualifies as edgy for the evening news.

Couric announces that she’lll have an exclusive interview with President Bush tomorrow, and manages not to gloat. She then spends a few seconds on the obligatory Steve Irwin item, but at least does not lead with the item, as NBC did yesterday. Who’s got gravitas now, punk?

The news has co-operated tonight by not overshadowing Couric with any important breaking events, allowing all us media analysts to focus on the truly substantive matter of what she’s wearing. (Eye-grabbing but not-too-girly bright-white jacket.) Instead, the broadcast opens with a packaged piece by Lara Logan on the Taliban, followed by

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"I’m very happy to be with you tonight." Couric sounds a bit needy here. Diane Sawyer would be making us feel like we were damn lucky she deigned to join us.

A whole minute into her broadcast, Couric’s show looks very much in the stand-up-and-stride-to-the-desk mold of modern evening news. But I’m interested to see the "freeSpeech"

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As we sit nervously awaiting The Day That Changed Everything, it’s worth wondering if the most interesting part of The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric will be the parts when Couric is not on-screen. The intriguing details that have leaked out, for instance, have to do with things like opinion segments–reportedly including Rush

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Tonight, Katie Couric embarks on the noble challenge of teaching Americans under 75 that there is a show that comes on the air before The Insider and Entertainment Tonight. Couric takes the helm of The CBS Evening News, and Tuned In–always proud to be your one-stop source for instant premature judgment and overcoverage of overhyped

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There is, face it, something a little narcissistic about pop-culture obituaries; when people memorialize a singer or TV host or actress from the past, as often as not they’re really eulogizing their own lost youth. But at least there’s something normal about that. Burying one of your kids’ pop-culture icons upsets the natural order of

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Television watching takes a lot out of a man, and even more so one so woefully unmanly as Tuned In. Which means it’s time for vacation. Between now and Labor Day, Tuned In will be ensconced at a remote tropical spa, dedicated to the purpose of rejuvenating TV critics. My eyes will be massaged and wrapped in a soothing poultice of mud,

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When I saw the doctored Reuters photograph of smoke rising over Beirut, side by side with the unaltered version of the same scene, the first thing I thought was: which is supposed to be the scary one? If I saw either cloud of smoke rising from a bomb blast in my own city, I wouldn’t be worried much about where it fell on the Pantone

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The era of the black monolith will soon be over. The New York Times reports that, with sales of flat-screen televisions taking over the share of all TVs sold much faster than expected, the day is coming when you cannot buy a good old-fashioned, cheap, back-breaking tube television for hernias or money. Some manufacturers have cut their

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Two items in the latest Advertising Age:

1. A study by EPoll Market Research finds that consumers respond more positively to fictional characters than to real people as commercial spokespeople. Among the most liked and trusted: McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy, Karen Walker from Will & Grace and the penguins from Madagascar.

2. A $225

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