Another new CBS innovation, called “Snapshots,” consisted Tuesday night of Couric sharing an “exclusive” look at the photos of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ baby published in the just-out-yesterday issue of Vanity Fair. Forget bad news judgment (which this undoubtedly was), this struck us as bad judgment in general — an invitation for everyone to say, “Told you so. It’s Today all over again.” To wit, the Miami Herald’s Garvin on “Snapshots”: “[I]t was an investigative scoop, pried with Woodward-and-Bernstein ingenuity from the clenched fists of Vanity Fair publicists, who would rather have red-hot pokers jabbed into their eyes than get half a million bucks worth of free advertising. The photos were presented as part of what apparently will be a regular segment … CBS bosses were apparently embarrassed enough that they opened the piece with footage of the network’s original anchor, Douglas Edwards, showing baby pictures of British royalty 50 years ago as a sort of justification.” And the New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley made a similar dig: “Perhaps worried that the segment would look too frivolous, Ms. Couric introduced it with a 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.”

Predictably, in nearly every next-day Couric review, the anchorwoman’s clothing choices were mentioned — often sheepishly, in parentheses, with the help of the phrase “for the record” (used in three different reviews, as if to say I realize this wardrobe critique is frivolous but “the record” demands that I include it nevertheless). One example, from the Sun-Sentinel: “For the record, Couric wore a white jacket (a day after Labor Day!) over a simple black top.” The Washington Post’s Shales dwelled longer than most on the matter of Couric’s attire, observing in his sixth paragraph that Couric “oddly wore a white blazer over a black top and skirt, the blazer buttoned in such a way as to make her look chubby, bursting at the button, which we know she isn’t. It was a poor choice …” And then there was the New York Sun, which led with the audacity of Couric’s blazer: “Wearing white after Labor Day isn’t a fashion crime anymore. But if Katie Couric really wanted us to focus on her reporting rather than her wardrobe, she shouldn’t have flouted one of the oldest rules in the book.” The reviewer went on to bristle that Couric’s “white jacket … wasn’t even winter white.”

Continuing with the superficial: At least nine separate reporters noted the visibility of Couric’s “legendary” or “famous” or “celebrated” legs — startled, apparently, by the reality that when professional women forego pantsuits for blazers and skirts, their legs will be visible. (For comparison, we had to look long and hard to find any media mentions of Brian Williams’ physical appearance the morning after he inherited the NBC Nightly News from Tom Brokaw in December 2004). The worst among the “legs-centric” reviewers? ” The Boston Herald’s Mark A. Perigard (story headline: “Katie May Have Leg Up, But It’s Not on the News”) who began his review thusly: “CBS is spending $15 million a year on Katie Couric. That comes to $7.5 million per shapely leg. The new CBS anchor flashed her gams just a few minutes into her debut.” And further along, in referencing a segment on terrorism during which Couric sat on a chair across from her guest, Perigard commented that “viewers across America were probably thinking her legs should be registered as weapons of mass destruction” (thereby outdoing any of the cringe-inducing quips that came from Couric’s mouth Tuesday night, of which there were several — such as: “Still ahead … it may be a record discovery of black gold in the Gulf of Mexico, but does it mean you’ll be yelling eureka at the gas pump?”).

And yet, as the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz observed yesterday: “In the end, it’s not about pleasing TV writers. Couric has to connect with the older people who tend to watch nightly newscasts. And if she doesn’t, the TV writers could turn skeptical in a hurry.”

Could turn? We’d say many of them turned long ago.

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