Paul,

Jonah Goldberg offered a good assessment of Katie Couric’s new endeavor in the latest print edition of National Review (or NRDT — “National Review Dead Tree,” in the lingo the young folks use nowadays):

But the broader point about Couric is: Who cares? The Big Three anchor system is a nostalgic cargo cult in a profession which can’t bring itself to accept that the era when these broadcasters were “the voice of God” (in the words of one CBS exec) is long gone. All this chatter about how Couric is a “pioneer” fails to grasp that the frontier is closed. It’s like hailing the first woman steamship captain long after the rise of the locomotive and the automobile. Yeah, it’s an accomplishment. But it’s an accomplishment on a sharply sliding scale — something like holding the best Oktoberfest in Orlando.

The unprecedented long runs of Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings disguised the fact that their influence diminished as news consumers derived benefits from the growth of non-broadcast competition, the development of new technology, and the success of openly ideological news sources.