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Couric staying, says former CBS exec

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Times Staff Writer

“CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric isn’t going anywhere, despite her difficulty in building a bigger audience for the show eight months into her tenure, former CBS News President Andrew Heyward said.

CBS took a big but necessary gamble by bringing on Couric to replace Bob Schieffer in the chair previously held by Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, Heyward said at a media conference in Manhattan on Wednesday.

The overall audience for broadcast news shows is shrinking, and CBS, mired in third place behind ABC and NBC, needed to shake things up even at the risk of losing some of its core audience, he said. Despite what some critics have suggested, Heyward said it was far too early for CBS to abandon the effort.

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“People who liked Bob Schieffer said, ‘She’s not like Bob Schieffer. Who’s more like Bob Schieffer? Charlie Gibson is.’ So they switched,” said Heyward, referring to the ABC anchor who has helped boost “World News” to the ratings lead.

CBS may have “pushed the envelope a bit too far,” especially in the early weeks of Couric’s show, by creating a new studio and otherwise changing the look and feel of the venerable program, Heyward said, but he added that he hoped the network wouldn’t backtrack.

“There’s a tendency when you’re under scrutiny to retreat to the familiar rather than explore the unknown because the familiar feels safe,” he said. “But things are moving too fast in this industry for familiarity to be safe anymore.”

Heyward, who left CBS News in 2005 in the wake of the network’s airing of bogus documents critical of President Bush’s National Guard service in the 1970s, is a senior advisor to Marketspace, a strategic consultancy. He made his remarks during a conference sponsored by the Argyle Executive Forum.

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thomas.mulligan@latimes.com

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