by Brian Reinhart

Created on: June 28, 2007

Dan Rather may have been rude to blast Katie Couric, and may have been wrong to accuse her alone, but sadly he has got the right idea. Simply put, the modern TV news is not as intelligent, weighty, respectable, or important as it used to be, and the main reason is that the news has gone down-market faster than an armadillo on concrete (to quote Rather himself).

Think back to the old days of television news, or see them re-enacted in the film "Good Night, and Good Luck." In past years, television news has had a gravity, an authority, that it doesn't have anymore. The anchors were heroes, fighting for the truth, telling people what they really need to learn. But they were more than that: they had an image of near-infallibility. They were people you could count on. If Edward R. Murrow said it, you could bet it was true. And they were respect magnets. When Walter Cronkite started talking, you stopped. Because they had something important to say, and you could tell.

The television anchors were called anchors for a reason: they had moral and intellectual weight. They were anchors of authority.

That's almost completely changed now.

Now reporters are happy to trade in their authority and "gravitas" for good looks, shallow geniality, and simple-minded political crusades. Katie Couric didn't start it. Actually, one of the contributors was Dan Rather himself, with his scandal-causing mistakes in the weeks before the 2004 election. And CNN's wave of young hunks and blondes reading two-sentence summaries of the headlines isn't helping the dumbing-down of the news, either.

In the end the responsibility for network news's downfall has to go to the producers, who have replaced the old bedrocks of authority with smiling, joking reporters with no real substance. No longer do anchors have "gravitas" - now they have an inch of makeup and teleprompters. The producers no longer value old-style investigation and infallibility - it just isn't the way to win the ratings game anymore.

But Katie Couric contributes quite knowingly to this problem, even if she isn't the cause. Her daytime-talk humor and demeanor aggravate the TV news's loss of credibility; unlike Cronkite, she just doesn't come across as someone you'd trust with your life. She's not an anchor; she's a lightweight. She's a bit of bubbly froth, and her show's views and analyses tend to be simplistic and shortsighted. She has a hard time finding distinctive news "scoops", and an equally hard time reporting about foreign countries.

The American people deserve a news show in which Paris, France gets more airtime than Paris Hilton; one with a true anchor, someone they can trust and respect, a figure who not only knows how to read the news but possesses genuine intellectual and moral weight and a nuanced, principled view of the world. That doesn't mean they want an ideologue - but even that would be better than an idiot. Ultimately, it's the companies themselves, the news producers, and the industry itself which must be held responsible. But Katie Couric deserves some of the blame - after all, she has the power to change what's wrong with the system. She has the ability to reverse the dumbing-down of the news. But she doesn't do it. Whether it's because she's in collusion with the "ratings people", or because she's dumb herself, Katie is part of the problem.

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