The Anchoress read a trivial-sounding blog post with Katie Couric's name on it, and responds, "I never thought I would say it, but I miss Dan Rather. I may not have agreed with him much of the time toward the end, but he had a curious mind, a willingness to ask questions and he possessed a voice and presence that conveyed…oh…gravitas."

Well, with the exception of his occasional "what's the frequency" freakouts, Rather did a pretty good of projecting the requisite gravitas on camera until he finally unraveled near the end, but Katie and Captain Dan are virtually identical in one respect: they're essentially actors who gets paid to put a dramatic intonation on dialogue that someone else has written for them. In Team America: World Police, the Janeane Garofolo wooden puppet (sorry for the redundancies) breathlessly shouts, "As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it's our own opinion"

Ironically, that's also a perfect description of the superstar anchorman or woman, as as Tom Wolfe noted in 1980:

Within the television news operations there’s such a premium put on not being a reporter. Everyone aspires to the man who never has to leave the building, the anchor man, who is a performer. The reporters are called researchers and are usually young women, and the correspondent on television is a substar, a supporting actor who prides himself on the fact that he doesn’t have to prepare the story. You talk to these guys and they’ll say, “Well, they sent me from Beirut to Teheran, and I had forty-five minutes to get briefed on the situation.” What they should say is, “I read the AP copy.” The idea is that as a performer you can pull together this news operation anywhere you go and the whole status structure is set up in such a way that you’re not going to get good reporters. Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. I’m sure there have been some. But what story during Watergate? During Watergate there were new stories coming out every day. None were on television, except when television simply broadcast the hearings. The can do a set event. And that’s what television is actually best at. In fact, it’d be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it’s getting news coverage.