The USS Couric's Maiden Voyage: New Anchor. Same Titanic.

Yes, yes, I know that Katie Couric’s move to CBS is a media story about serious NETWORK news, not local tabloid mayhem. But despite all the hype about the first female solo news anchor, the “perky” factor, etc., it does seem odd that we’re paying so much attention to a change of faces in an aging medium.

“We’re getting new deck chairs for the Titanic is the bottom line,” muttered the Hollywood Reporter’s veteran TV columnist Ray Richmond, sitting next to me at Couric’s CBS press conference in Pasadena this summer.

Couric, for her part, was gamely upbeat about the difference she’ll make. “We heard from many people that the news is just too depressing,” she said. “Obviously, we can’t sugarcoat what’s going on in the world, but there are cases where I believe we can be a little more solution-oriented.” Which brings to mind that old saw about the weather: Everyone talks about it, no one ever does anything about it.

Now I’m as critical of traditional media gatekeepers as anyone, but the hard truth is that a lot of complaints people have about the news are just ridiculous. I remember going to hear Michael Kinsley, then still editor of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial pages, speak to a Harvard-Radcliffe Club gathering in Los Angeles last year. A woman there complained that her 20-year-old niece doesn’t read newspapers because they’re biased. Couldn’t papers serve young, impatient readers, this woman asked, by running both points of view side by side?

“I think that’s a bit of an excuse,” Kinsley said carefully. He was being polite, of course. Obviously, the poor woman just has a stupid niece.

CBS has long been known as the geriatric network, and I sometimes wonder why they don’t just embrace that demographic instead of trying to fight it. Older viewers, being older, have more money to spend on whatever advertisers might care to sell them. So I sometimes wonder about all this chasing after that elusive (and poorer) youth demographic.

One strange, counterintuitive fact about TV is that even though younger viewers have less to spend, they’re willing to spend what they have. Maybe not on mini-vans - but certainly on fast food, beer, acne treatments, cheap clothes and whatever idiotic new movie (“Accepted,” “Snakes On a Plane” etc.) the test marketers have dreamed up.

Viewers 50 and older, the thinking goes, are going to stay in and watch TV anyway. “They also read, listen to the radio, watch CNN,” TV writer-producer Rob Long once told me. “Older people tend to be interested in the world around them. Young people spend most of their time listening to music and masturbating.” In other words, they’re hard to reach and easy to alienate. This reminds me of my first up-close-and-personal experience with news anchors - an elementary school field trip to the KNBC newsroom in L.A. My field trip buddy, a girl named Susie Briggs, was for some reason terribly excited by the prospect of getting Tom Snyder to sign her autograph book. Why, I do not know. This was years before Tomorrow With Tom Snyder, and the ensuing Dan Aykroyd imitations on Saturday Night Live. Certainly no one else brought an autograph book that day.

It was a pretty tedious field trip, involving much stepping over cables and watching people sit at desks reading the news. But at the end, my field trip buddy Susie went up to Snyder and asked for his autograph.

I will never forget Snyder leaning down to say, “Can I just shake your hand instead? Because if I sign yours, all the other kids will want me to sign theirs too.”

I stared up at him, thinking, “Is he out of his mind? Can’t he see that she’s the ONLY one with an autograph book? Who does he think he is - Bobby Sherman or something?”

And that was the beginning of my life as a media critic.

PajamasMedia Special Correspondent CATHERINE SEIPP writes the weekly “From the Left Coast” column for National Review Online, a monthly column for Independent Women’s Forum and freelances other places, such as the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. She previously wrote columns for: Buzz, Mediaweek, UPI, New York Press and Salon. Her work has also appeared in Reason, Penthouse, TV Guide, the National Post and Forbes.
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