In the latest dead tree issue of National Review (also available online, but subscription required), Jonah Goldberg observes Katie Couric's CBS debut with a yawn and a shrug:

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.

Katie is at least an extremely youthful-looking (dare I say, perky?) 49. Found via Maggie's Farm, Alex Beam writes that NPR has, if anything, an even worse aging issue with both its audience and its anchors:

The once-incisive Daniel Schorr, now 90, triggers a Pavlovian station-changing reflex. One of NPR's top talk show hosts is the ancient, politically connected, unlistenable Diane Rehm , who has been suffering from a speech disorder for years. (She's on in New Hampshire.) It's the retirement community of the air!

So, if you pumped $225 million into the public radio system -- the Kroc endowment spins off about $10 million a year -- listenership would go up, right? Um, no. At a big NPR confab in Philadelphia last week, programmers learned that ``the public radio audience is starting to decline after long, steady growth," according to Lydon's blog. NPR executive Stern prefers to characterize the decline as ``drift, flatness or maybe a plateau after a period of unstoppable growth . . . We're facing the same challenges everyone is," he explains, primarily from the Internet.

Here is the problem. What was once an insurgent radio movement now sounds like Chet Huntley reading the evening news. Call it NPR Classic. But NPR management won't put the old warhorses like Cokie and Linda out to pasture for fear of alienating the loyal listeners who answer the bell during pledge drives.

And for reasons that combine technology and demographics, it's an extremely safe bet that both networks' audiences will only get grayer--and smaller--moving forward.

Update: Rand Simberg has a succinct capsule summary of Katie Couric...blogger.