Hello, perky.

I AM writing this the day after Katie Couric took the helm of CBS Evening News. Full disclosure: I didn't watch much of the broadcast. Even though I make some of my living by staying abreast of the media, I just couldn't be bothered to care. Or, to be more accurate, I couldn't be bothered to care enough to remember that she was on. Brit Hume's "Political Grapevine" segment had just started on Fox News when the curtain went up on Couric, and before it dawned on me that the princess of perk was on the "Tiffany network," she was already wrapping up her closing thoughts. From what I could glean, these thoughts were, well, perky. No Ratheresque "Courage" for Katie--nor those even more Ratheresque outbursts that tended to sound more like code to World War II troops behind enemy lines than news anchoring. "That's the news for tonight. Jimmy crack corn and the fat man bathes in dirty moonlight."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

From what I read about her performance, Katie Couric was Aesopian in her Katie Couricness. Just as the scorpion said to the frog, "You knew I was a scorpion when you agreed to carry me on your back" (or words to that effect), anybody at CBS complaining about Couric's coquettishness need only be told, "You knew she was Katie Couric when you hired her."

But the broader point about Couric is: Who cares? The Big Three anchor system is a nostalgic cargo cult in a profession which can't bring itself to accept that the era when these broadcasters were "the voice of God" (in the words of one CBS exec) is long gone. All this chatter about how Couric is a "pioneer" fails to grasp that the frontier is closed. It's like hailing the first woman steamship captain long after the rise of the locomotive and the automobile. Yeah, it's an accomplishment. But it's an accomplishment on a sharply sliding scale--something like holding the best Oktoberfest in Orlando.

First of all, being an anchor just isn't that hard. Broadcast journalism is one of the few fields in American life where the work gets demonstrably easier the higher you go. Or, to be fairer, the parts of the job that have to do with what everyone thinks of as "journalism" get easier and easier, and in some cases the journalism simply vanishes altogether. Andrew Tyndall, the respected TV analyst, defines the job of news anchor as being able to read the news and "sitting behind the desk when there's a crisis."

Second, and more to the point, nobody's watching. The average viewer of a Big Three broadcast is 60 years old. Only about 10 percent of viewers are under 35. The dream is that by having Katie on the air, CBS will attract an audience slightly less interested in Viagra, Flomax, Depends, and other products aimed at the geriatric set. But the truth is that younger people will never return to the Big Three networks, for the simple reason that they don't have to. News-anchor festishists forget that Cronkite & Co. commanded so much authority mainly because they had no competition. CBS is betting that, by trading avuncular for peppy, it will be able to turn back the clock. It's just not going to happen.