“And so it is / Just like you said it would be / Life goes easy on me / Most of the time / And so it is.” Not even halfway through her five-year, $15 million/year contract with CBS News, and Katie Couric is already said to be in talks with CBS chief Les Moonves and CBS News head Sean McManus to shape her exit. It’ll likely come after November’s presidential election or January’s inauguration, and nobody’s entirely sure where Katie will end up, or who will take over the Evening News. Two plausible scenarios: Katie will wait out CNN’s Capt. Fartypants, Larry King, to replace him (his deal expires in 2009), or she’ll grab her own talk show on CBS, or a full-time gig on 60 Minutes, or they’d let her go free to run through the meadows in search of a better deal. Though CBS brass continue to think she’s doing an excellent job with her 22 minutes a night, she hasn’t been able to pull the show’s ratings up to a competitive level; CBS Evening News draws an average 5.9 million viewers to NBC’s 8.3m and ABC’s 8m. All this, and just when Howard Kurtz started rolling out the sympathy red carpet.