Katie Couric diddles while CBS News burns

While CBS News staffers clear out their desks or find themselves banned from entering the building during a week of bloody, unsparing layoffs for the once revered division, their field marshal, chief newsreader, celebrity and most highly-paid worker in television news, "Katie" Couric, plays Leon Helmsley for Harper's Bazaar magazine. The big powerful television news authority, national balm during times of emergency and crisis, using her blog words like "gussied up," "glamour puss" and "moi," playing make-up and dress-up like a spoiled little girl. In the words of the late Pauly Fuemana, how bizarre. Bad timing, anyone?

All's well at CBS News: Katie's salary is safe

Comforting to know that in wake of the brutal axing of around 150 CBS News employees-- and these CBS News people are loyal, hard-working, True Believers who operate on the assumption that they and their battered ship are something special-- like that Letterman extortion guy did-- that the president of CBS News is assuring the rest of the media that they have no plan to trim the chubby $15 million salary of their last-place chief newsreader (and highest-paid TV journo) "Katie" Couric.

Sez Sean McManus: “Katie’s work on the Evening News, 60 Minutes and special events is brilliant. Nobody in the business works harder than Katie and I can tell you unequivocally that there have been and are no plans and not even a single discussion about making a change or renegotiating.”

Savour those words for now. We'll revisit them a few months down the line when it's announced that "Katie" is moving to afternoon talk. (Oprah's leaving, and you remember the Jane Pauley show...)

(Drudge quotes a "veteran producer" saying ""She makes enough to pay 200 news reporters $75,000 a year!" which is cute, because producers make a lot more than that...)

Hey, CBS News has to pay her salary

Word began spreading a few days ago that CBS News (the network division whose putative field marshal is called "Katie") was in for some layoffs this week, with as many as 100 people-- seven percent of the 1,400 staffers around the world-- getting the axe. Day one of the week has ended and apparently the suits om CBS Human Resources don't follow the practice of giving the hard word on Friday afternoons so the fired ones will have a weekend to cool off before deciding to return to the office with a rifle.

After what went on today, they're calling it "Black Monday."

Writes one CBS Newser:

"Black Monday -- it's been a brutal day at CBS News, layoffs in DC, London, NY, LA, Miami, just about everywhere. We lost some very good people today."