"I'm not Chevy Chase, and nobody cares."

While it may be big news within journalism circles whether Katie Couric’s job as anchor at CBS Nightly News is secure, it is no more newsworthy to the average American than the latest cricket scores from England.

I don’t watch the evening network news. What’s more, I don’t know anybody who does. I mean it, not a single person. Oh, maybe now and then. But regularly? Nope. Think about that.

As David Letterman aptly noted about his and Jay Leno’s role in the post-Carson era of late night television, it will simply never be the case again that one person can hold sway over America the way Carson did for thirty years on the Tonight Show, and the same can be said about Walter Cronkite's career for nearly twenty years as anchor of the CBS Evening News. None of the subsequent broadcast network news anchors, least of which the lamentable Dan Rather, could hope to be what Cronkite, for better or worse, became in our national consciousness.

The reasons are obvious enough. The broadcast troika lost their oligopoly status as purveyors of news first with the advent of PBS, then with cable television and finally with the rise of the internet. Even running show in a three horse race once meant that a significant part of the population was tuning in and news programming could thus be profitable or at least not a losing proposition.

Moreover, America’s first television generation was transfixed by the ability to see coverage of the major news of the past twenty-four hours, while subsequent generations take such things for granted. For that matter, twenty-four hours is an eternity in a world where technology permits initial coverage moments after a story breaks. By the time Couric or any of the other network anchors tells us what happened today we already know, or can if we wish to know, far more about the story than anything they can cover in a moment or two of broadcast time.

Ironically, network news has always been the USA Today of journalism, ironic because USA Today was founded to be the print equivalent of the nightly news. However valuable the network news organizations may be for continuing coverage of a crisis, their role otherwise cannot help but continue to decline regardless of who reads the news on camera.