How Katie Couric got her groove back, plus this week's media winners and sinners

A funny thing happened to the CBS Evening News on the way to the ratings basement: Katie Couric has finally found her stride. With the help of veteran TV newser Rick Kaplan as her executive producer, she is now anchoring the most substantive evening newscast on network television.

Kaplan arrived 18 months ago—six months after Couric became anchor, which was just about the time most TV critics had written off the broadcast because it was a commercial failure, languishing in third place behind NBC and ABC. But Kaplan, who worked on Walter Cronkite's broadcast for seven years in the 1970s before moving on to ABC and MSNBC, has toughened up the show with longer pieces and many more facts. For example, the night after the AIG takeover, Brian Williams wasted much of his broadcast building the CNBC brand by chatting with correspondents of that sister network, while over at CBS you could actually learn the details of how much control the federal government got over the company in exchange for its $85 billion.

Way back on September 2, CBS was far ahead of the competition with two hard-hitting reports on Sarah Palin—the first one by Nancy Cordes about the nonvetting of the Alaska governor before her selection as vice presidential nominee, the second by Wyatt Andrews, completely debunking Palin's "thanks but no thanks" line on the bridge to nowhere, as well as her imaginary opposition to earmarks ("Under Gov. Palin, Alaska applied for $197 million in earmarks for the 2009 fiscal year"), and her controversial firing of the state's public safety commissioner. Those two stories took up five minutes and 30 seconds—one quarter of the whole broadcast.

In an interview with Kaplan, FCP suggested the broadcast was going back to its much more serious roots under Cronkite. "I'm grateful that you would observe that, but it's not exactly accurate," Kaplan replied—because Cronkite saw his show as the "broadcast of record," while Kaplan is trying to do fewer stories at greater length. "We try to concentrate on the most important issues of the day, and we try to bring those issues to people in as clear and concise and fair way as we can," Kaplan said.

Earlier this month, the program kicked off "Where They Stand," a total of 25 planned issues pieces on everything from personal income taxes to withdrawal from Iraq, each lasting six minutes—an extraordinarily long piece for a modern evening network newscast. Did the show feel liberated to be more serious because it was still in third place?

"The truth of it is we came here with a certain set of goals in mind," said Kaplan. "I'd say we'd do this no matter how many viewers we had or didn't have, because I think this is what viewers are looking for."

Maybe it's working: The week of September 6, the broadcast had 6,210,000 viewers—the most it has had since last March. But that still puts it 2.5 million viewers out of first place.