Update: Go to the bottom of this post for a shining, just-released example of modern political discourse: “Debate ‘08: Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl” — with a special guest appearance from Kucinich Girl!

Katie Couric is having second thoughts about her new job as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, and CBS is losing faith in her as the cover girl of their once-preeminent news division. That’s the conclusion of an attention-grabbing cover story in last week’s New York Magazine. While I don’t have any particular problem with Katie Couric as a person, this seemed like an opportune time to take a deeper look at the precipitous decline of television news of which she has so visibly become a symbol. After all, neither the NYMag piece nor the critical commentary on it offered much historical (or moral) context.

A clip of David Strathairn brilliantly channeling the ghost of Ed Murrow, the face of CBS throughout the 1950s, will help set the stage. The three minutes you spend watching this will be worth a year of network news, so check it out. If you can, imagine Couric delivering such a speech today.

Yes, Murrow said those exact words, and many more, back in 1958. People on TV used to talk like that.

For comparison, I watched about 30 of the “Katie Couric’s Notebook” 1-minute segments on YouTube, and the most profound statement on the media I could find from her was in a brief discussion of Al Gore’s latest book. Hit the jump for the Couric video and more.

Couric’s commentary on the media is neither as substantive nor self-reflective as Murrow’s (who described it as his “duty” to inform Americans of the intricacies of media ownership). She may be just as informed, but it’s hard to tell when CBS has reportedly denied her requested trips to Iraq and Afghanistan and surrounded her with producers who water down the news and keep the commentary innocuous. So while Couric appears to have shirked her responsibilities, CBS deserves the bulk of the blame.

I’ve always been confounded by the network’s decision to fill such a symbolically important position with someone who had for over a decade been contractually required to be superficial and palatable on the Today Show. (Say what you will about the aging audience and declining viewership of the network newscasts, their ratings still crush even the giants of cable news.) If CBS was going to make the job a joke, why not go all the way and hire Jon Stewart? He’d make the evening news far more entertaining and informative, and almost undoubtedly double CBS’s last-place ratings. If Les Moonves is such a business genius, then why can we all come up with better ideas?

I understand CBS’s unending quest for ratings, which they incorrectly assumed Couric’s big name and personality would boost. But was there any substantive rationale behind the decision to hire her? The U.S. is in the midst of a humanitarian and political crisis in Iraq, the principles of our democracy are under an unprecedented attack from within, and the quality of the news media in America is consistently pinpointed as the reason for our deteriorating public discourse. The media failed us on Iraq, they’re failing us on health care and terrorism, and they’ll fail us again on our counter-productive policy toward Iran unless one of the few corporations controlling the news business takes a stand. CBS understands that the future of this nation and the long-term survival of humanity could hang in the balance, so they hire Katie Couric to set things right? Right…

The little-heard suggestion that DemocracyNow!’s Amy Goodman - or a more recognizable personality like CNN’s Christiane Amanpour - would have been a smarter and more responsible choice than Couric is usually met with derision. But I think (and hope) that such dismissals underestimate the public’s appetite for honest news. And they surely misjudge the extraordinary influence that a handful of major corporations exert on the media.

Imagine if CBS, or any major network, hired an anchor who was deeply informed and who cared more about the kind of world that future generations would inhabit than they did about their own career. Then imagine that network backed their passionate but open-minded anchor with a stellar production team and a large measure of independence. Finally, imagine the network rolled out a compelling marketing strategy that exposed the utter inadequacy of what passes for news today and promised a renaissance of truth-telling in the vein of Murrow and Cronkite. There’s no guarantee that the approach would immediately catch-on with the public, but the network would have single-handedly shifted the status quo of the nightly newscast in a more positive, informative, and even transformative direction. Of course there would be a risk to shareholders in the short-term; but if Goodman, Amanpour, or Stewart didn’t work out, they could just hire someone new and start over. And wasn’t the hiring of Couric also a risk?

The CBS Evening News costs an estimated $35 million to produce. This might seem like a lot until you realize that Couric’s salary accounts for about half of the total, and the overall operating expenses for CBS’s television operations exceeded $6.2 billion in 2006.

Investing in real, “hard-hitting” news, whether it comes from Jon Stewart or a modern-day Murrow, isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also good business.

Update: Despite my somber tone, I believe in thinking creatively about how to attract people to politics (and yes, entertain them) so that they may change it. Because “the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies, and sponsors will not be shaken or altered” anytime soon, we might as well take a little time to enjoy the fruits of our decadent, insulated and escapist society. The video for “Debate ‘08: Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl,” released today, has some genuinely funny lyrics and is surprisingly entertaining. (Kucinich Girl makes a special guest appearance at 2:16!)