'Dumbed down, tarted up' - Dan Rather's verdict on his successors at CBS news

Just as its beleaguered producers were searching for ways to stop the haemorrhaging of its audience, CBS Evening News is in the headlines itself thanks to a sizzling public row about its anchor, Katie Couric.

Stirring the publicity is Dan Rather, who occupied the anchor chair for 24 years until his departure under a journalistic cloud in March 2005. The programme is in the dumps, he said earlier this week, because under Couric it had been "dumbed" down and "tarted" up. He has stirred a debate not just about Couric but also about the viability of hard news in the celebrity era.

When CBS lured Couric away from her perch as co-host of NBC's hit breakfast show, Today, nine months ago, it agreed to pay her $15m (£7.6m) a year. Executives thought her star power and perky persona would at least bring younger and female viewers back to a news programme that was already ailing. Instead the ratings continued to slide. Recently, the slide has become a plunge.

"The mistake," Rather told the MSNBC channel, "was to try to bring the Today show ethos to the Evening News, and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience".

The assault prompted Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, to strike back at Rather and accuse him flatly of sexism. Rather returned fire again, saying his comments were less about Couric and more about Mr Moonves, who "doesn't know about news".

No one can deny the programme is in trouble, however. It badly trails the competition on ABC and NBC and last month broke a record with the lowest numbers for a network news show in 20 years.

The suggestion was made that viewers simply still prefer white men to deliver the news to them. But Andrew Tyndall, a news analyst, said viewers were used to female news presenters on regional television. Mr Tyndall observed a tension between hard and soft content. Rather was forced out of CBS after fumbling a story in 2004 about George Bush and favours he may have received to avoid Vietnam service. Yet, few figures in the industry can argue the case for hard news over soft with more credibility.

"We have enormous life-or-death issues and challenges facing us in this country and the world today," Rather told the Washington Post yesterday. "Everything from the dismantling of civil rights enforcement within the Justice Department to the war in Iraq to news of secret prisons in Europe. Yet, for some reason, Paris Hilton is the big story."