As Katie Couric ascends to the anchor chair at CBS Evening News, her first big challenge will be to overcome her morning show persona as a fluff-peddling soft-news pusher. Theoretically, CBS would be interested in helping her with this. After all, the CBS News throne was once warmed by the buttocks of such gravitas-oozing alleged legends as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

But apparently, staffers at CBS’s promotional magazine Watch! did not get the memo. Treating Couric like any other cover-gracing floozy-du-jour, her picture was photoshopped to de-frumpify her by several inches.

I’m guessing that Katie’s first story as CBS anchor will not be a discussion of women’s body image issues. (That was more of a Today show thing, anyway.)

But at least if you own stock in CBS parent Viacom, you should be happy with the company’s frugality. Flashier networks would have paid for the plastic surgery.