Actually, much to our dismay, Katie Couric and co. are right on target

I don't really like Katie Couric. I frankly resent the fact that I've had to see her dozens of times in that endlessly replayed video of her rendezvous with a butt doctor. I'm not particularly into looking at the inside of anybody's colon. Nor do I like her evening news broadcast—at least I didn't like the first one, which is the only one I've seen so far, because I have a job. I didn't like the Today show when she was on, and I generally find her chipmunk routine to be creepy coming from a 49-year-old.

So deep in my misanthropic heart, I long for her failure. Which is why it pains me to say that she and CBS News got a bad rap last week in a raft of stories about the ratings slide she's been on since ascending to the anchor chair last month in an orgy of publicity. The headlines—from the Associated Press and Reuters to People and USA Today—blared "worst week" and "ratings disaster," and the stories all led with the fact that viewership has been in decline for five consecutive weeks, which finds the CBS Evening News back in third place. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to note that "the fall-off of the former Today show anchor's audience since her debut has provoked a strong sense of unease internally, according to newsroom employees," many of whom are "alarmed that the program isn't faring better." The negative press appears to have spooked CBS enough to shuttle Couric over to the Ed Sullivan Theater on Thursday so she can flash those sparkling teeth of hers on David Letterman's show.

All of it may be true—although the Los Angeles Times didn't see fit to quote, even anonymously, any of those "alarmed" newsroom employees—but it should come as no surprise to anyone who covered the launch of Katie 2.0. Throughout the run-up to Couric's debut, CBS News executives consistently indicated that they fully expected the show to benefit from a short-term burst of publicity before returning to normal viewership levels.

Here's CBS News president Sean McManus in an interview with TV Week published the day before launch: "No one here is expecting CBS to be No. 1 overnight. I'm much more concerned about the ratings in September 2007 and 2008 than 2006."

Here he is in a Los Angeles Times story (written by the same reporter who found those alarmed insiders) the same week: "McManus cautioned that moving out of third place will not be easy, even with one of the country's best-known broadcasters in the anchor chair. 'I'm not going to consider this a failure if in three months or six months we're not in first place,' he said."

Another CBS executive told me that the expectation prior to the launch was for Couric to blast to first place for a few weeks before settling back down to third. The idea was to build from there. You can't change entrenched viewing habits overnight, and the CBS Evening News has been in third place for 13 years.

But so what? The CBS Evening News is still in the basement, right? Not quite. As the Couric-bashing stories dutifully note—after the stuff about the ratings slide—the show was up 8 percent in its fifth week from the year before in total viewers, while NBC and ABC were down 2 percent and 3 percent, respectively. And in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that networks use to sell ads for news programs, CBS was up 19 percent, while NBC and ABC were both down. A year ago, the viewership gap between NBC and CBS was 2.2 million people in NBC's favor. A week ago it was 1.5 million. Sure, the trendline isn't encouraging. Couric has bled an average of 750,000 viewers per week since she started. But where else would her numbers go, given that she attracted more viewers out of the gate than any newscast has averaged since 1993?

The aforementioned subtleties don't fit into the hype-cycle narrative that newspapers adhere to, particularly when dealing with heavyweights like Couric. CBS trotted her out like a prize mare, sent her on a flesh-pressing tour of the heartland, and plastered her face on every bus stop in the continental U.S. So the same reporters that gladly covered the heroic CBS rollout are naturally eager to puncture that myth at the first sign of weakness: "You said she was the best!" The problem is, they were too distracted by the bright lights and party favors of the Festival of Katie to pay much attention to what the people who actually know what they are talking about—the executives—were saying. Granted, most things television executives say are not true. But in this case, all their intensive expectations-management was entirely warranted. Not that it did CBS any good.

Rome Hartman, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News, who will likely regret speaking to me after reading the first paragraph of this column, acknowledges that he is a victim of his own press. "The Fifth of September was a beginning for us," he said, referring to the date of Couric's first broadcast. "But in some ways, it was perceived as an end by the press. Clearly there was a promotional effort by CBS, but it took on a life of its own larger than anything we were planning. All along, we have been very realistic about the fact that these things move glacially."

None of this is to say that Couric won't slide into obscurity soon and attempt to stage a late-night mugging—"What's the frequency, Kathleen?"—in a desperate bid for attention. But if you're going to revel in the failure of a high-profile news anchor, as I hope to do one day soon, you ought to give her a chance to actually fail before popping the champagne. Maybe last week's evening news ratings, which Nielsen will release Tuesday, will show enough of a fresh decline to give us hope. Until then, we'll have to wait.