Jonathan C. Movroydis at The New Nixon Blog makes a great observation about the state of the legacy media:

Consistently, The Ancien Régime of news media has been a target of the blogosphere for journalistic faux pas, to which the archetypal MSMer retorts: “you guys comment on the news we report on.”

As a student blogger who reports on the problem of radical jihad on my college campus, I am constantly amused on how behind the curve the main stream media really is. Rare are the Upton Sinclairs, the Edward Murrows, and even the Bob Woodwards who are able to discern from the competing narratives of their sources and excite their readers with real nitty gritty investigative journalism.

But perhaps more amusing was reading that CBS is considering using CNN for its clandestine reporting. John Hinderaker of Powerline points out the startling fact that CBS will fire its own reporters to keep the likes of erratic commentator Katie Couric despite increased demands for raw stories and hard news by the viewing public.

Unless Katie is writing her own in the field news segments, the idea that she's a "journalist" is of course silly--she's a newsreader, as the British correctly use the term, who is paid to add her inflections to copy written by a large staff of writers and producers (hey, somebody should make a video that references this sort of thing!), just as an actor is hired by a film company to put his or her inflections on dialogue written by others. And there's nothing wrong with that--except that in the past, America got a little crazy in how it lionized its more stentorian newsreaders of the past.

CBS questions the accuracy of the recent Times article--and who doesn't these days at Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair's favorite newspaper of "record"?. But if CBS actually did go ahead and outsource its actual reporting and news gathering operations to CNN, will this make Katie America's highest paid video blogger--albeit using a much more sclerotic legacy medium, rather than YouTube or Brightcove?

Or is she that already?

(Via Uncorrelated.)