Tom Shales

That “tick tick tick” heard in the hallways at CBS News isn’t the “60 Minutes” clock—or Walter Cronkite’s pacemaker. It’s the Countdown to Katie, suspenseful buildup to the monumental moment on Tuesday, Sept. 5, when Katie Couric takes over the “CBS Evening News.”

And what are people saying? What are they talking about?

They’re wondering if she’s going to wear slacks. They’re asking if her legs are going to show. They’re even debating whether the anchor desk will be made of plexiglass so that we can all play peekaboo through it. “Nobody asked those kinds of questions when Brokaw started doing ‘Nightly News,’” says Steve Friedman, the über producer who reinvented the “Today” show and now runs morning television for CBS News. “Nobody asked what Charlie Gibson was going to wear when he took over the Peter Jennings show on ABC.”

And lest one think this is a clear-cut case of shameful sexism at the old-boy networks, let it be noted that women are making much of the catty chatter. The old grump of a TV critic who fixated on her legs was of the female, not male, persuasion. There’s so much emphasis on appearance, you’d almost think Katie had been recruited from amongst the bouncy babes at the Playboy mansion. Are people forgetting what she proved in all those years at “Today”? That she’s bright, quick, assertive, intelligent and hugely personable? And not easily intimidated?

“It’s 22 minutes of reading news; how hard can it be?” scoffs a producer at another network. What’s hard, of course, is getting the audience at home to prefer the way you read the 22 minutes of news to the way Charlie Gibson at ABC and Brian Williams at NBC do it. To Katie’s benefit, even though Gibson and Williams both run first-rate newscasts, neither has exactly lit a raging bonfire in Nielsen’s computer. Katie—I mean, Couric—will be the one clear distinctive choice.

Neither Gibson nor Williams looms as large as did Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings or David Brinkley. In time, they might. But the playing field as the race begins is remarkably even. And for better or worse, Katie’s the one whom the paparazzi will be waiting to spot on her way back from lunch. She’s instantly the biggest star among the three network anchors.

Friedman says he drops by on Fridays to see how the new set is coming along. “It’s being finished up this week,” he says, but he doesn’t exactly paint a vivid mind-picture of how it will look. Is Katie going to be perched on a chair behind a big wooden credenza as Rather was? “I would doubt very much that she would spend every minute of every broadcast sitting behind a desk,” says Friedman, sounding as though he knows more than he’s telling.

One of the genuinely curious facts about Couric, for all the gibes she endures about being Rebecca of Sunnybrook News, is that she is notorious within the business for having high negative Q’s. Her Q ratings are high, but her negative Q’s are whoppers, a seeming contradiction that baffles many an old pro.

Friedman dismisses the so-called negative Q’s. If Couric has them, he says, they didn’t keep her from beating Q’s-through-the-roof Diane Sawyer on every day of every week they went up against each other in the morning. They didn’t keep her from clobbering Harry Smith and his harem on CBS either.

And Couric is already an old hand at handing Gibson his hat. So no matter what she wears, no matter whether she sits behind a desk or lounges on a chaise, no matter how perky or cute or lovely-legged Couric is alleged to be, from here it looks like Gibson and Williams have a lot more to worry about than she does. Tick tick tickety tick tick…..