Hello, perky.(services of television journalist 'Katie Couric')

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 ...