While waiting for Matt Drudge's breathless Katie Couric story, I came across this op-ed by Jeff Simon of The Buffalo News titled, "Katie Couric Deserves To Be Watched". There's more than a twinge of desperation in that headline, and not surprisingly, the Freepers, where I found the piece originally, can smell it. Key quote by Simon:

What people continually refuse to see is that nightly anchor is not a journalistic job as much as it is a theatrical one. It’s a role. And what we want from whoever takes the role is simplicity and reassurance. The nightly news anchor is auditioning for that moment when the country truly needs them — election nights or, most importantly, moments of national trauma when it’s their job to impart bad news in ways that keep spirits on an even keel.

Let's unpack that a bit: not everyone refuses to believe the anchorperson role is a theatrical one. And as I've also written before, I'm all-too-happy to tune out television on election night these days. The only thing interesting on those nights is seeing what sort of slick piece of high tech set design the anchor's art department comes up with to frame him in to generate a semblance of gravitas. Otherwise, the Internet is a far better place to be when election returns come tumbling in.

Finally, the idea that "The nightly news anchor is auditioning for that moment when the country truly needs them" is what has led to so much filler in the news, as Drew Curtis of Fark puts it, since the big three networks feel that they must generate a half hour of television news every night even as its ratings shrink. And there's infinitely even more filler on the 24-hour cable news channels.

So what have the network nightly news broadcasts become? Like the newspaper, largely an exercise in nostalgia, as Andrew Breitbart mentioned to me when I interviewed him last week:

I think that to a major a degree, Katie Couric and her ilk are doomed. I think that from my vantage, and I can’t speak for everyone else, but the Internet was the first nail in the nightly news coffin. But I think the TiVo and YouTube and the second and third ones. There’s almost nothing important that happens out there, that a person can’t come home and find online. That need to be in front of the television at 5:30 or 6:30 in the evening is over. Only people in their nursing homes, who are watching their television sets because that’s a lifelong habit are getting their news that way.

There so many people having a laugh at Katie Couric or Brian Williams’ expense because of the dwindling numbers but it’s a less a function of them being pathetic, as many would like to think, than the dramatic shifts in which we digest our information. There’s just almost no need for them.

I recall, on the weekend, watching shows that Stone Phillips and John Siegenthaler would put together for Dateline, which would take advantage of NBC’s vast video vault.

I look at Nightly News as a short-term nostalgia through the day’s events. It feels like those weekend shows, where they’re just taking advantage of the fact that they half hour of advertisements to sell and so it feels like a video vault filler session of the news events. And I think that the average person is looking at that half hour news hour with that sort of kitschy sensibility. It’s sort like, ‘I remember that story happening half a day ago; I saw it on CNN, I saw it again on CNN.com. Then I saw it again on the Drudge Report, and then I saw it again on Breitbart.com, or Breitbart.tv and YouTube.

So the networks are no long providing that first responder value that they used to. And it’s mildly tragic to watch how slow they’ve been to come to the realization that they, like everyone else, have to adapt to the market, and they’ve been quite slow to it.

More from Breitbart here.

Just as I finished this post, Drudge's story on Couric went up: Couric sounds like she's discovered her inner Patton, as she's "being accused of slapping an editor" after he inserted the world "sputum" into a script.

Thirty years from now, when you're sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you, "What did you do in the great television ratings wars," you won't have to say, "Well...I shoveled sputum in Manhattan".

Update: I did not have slaps with that editor!