K-k-k-katie. . .

The title is an old song reference you won't get. Ask your grandparents. From Tad Friend (what a great name) in The New Yorker:

In its first week, “The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” made so much room for soft news—“Snapshots” of Tom Cruise’s alien love child; pop-song teasers for the closing human-interest story—and a my-two-cents segment in which the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Morgan Spurlock (the network’s version of voiceless outsiders) opined, that her broadcast usually had time for four correspondents’ reports instead of the standard six or seven. All these mild innovations, then, made the world seem about fifty per cent smaller. On Friday, three of the broadcast’s segments were set in either New York or Pennsylvania.

. . . .It wasn’t the traditional evening news, exactly, but, then, the evening news hasn’t been particularly traditional since 1981, when Walter Cronkite retired. Nowadays, the networks assume that you’re up to date on the headlines, and they devote much of their energy to explaining how those headlines will affect your bank account and your life expectancy. Couric hit this note hard. On Tuesday, she promised three separate times that an upcoming report on a new oil field in the Gulf of Mexico would explain whether the discovery would mean “cheaper prices at the pump.” The report didn’t actually address how the find would affect gasoline prices—but, then, Couric is so darn likable.

That may be enough. Anchors, who are customarily onscreen for only three to six minutes a night, are not chosen for their investigative skills or their familiarity with the tax code. They are chosen for their uncommon ability to summon trust, to shepherd us from the end of the day to the beginning of the night, and to watch over us during national traumas. On an ordinary day, a trusted anchor is like that first Martini.