OK, maybe I get the situation after all.

For years, I've been flumoxed about the pathetic state of network news: not what's wrong with it, but why the net execs don't get what's wrong with it.

They are well aware that something is wrong. Ratings have declined rapidly for several years, and the story is monumentally worse demographically. The average age for the nightly network newscasts is now something like 60, which barely even seems possible. (Median age of 60 would be bad enough, but average? That means for every 20 year-old watching, there are three 80 year-olds, or six 70 year-olds. Unbelievable. The number of young adults watching is trending toward zero.

That's a huge problem for the nets now--because advertisers don't pay much for old folks--and a life or death problem for them in the medium run, because as Les Moonves admitted in so many words last night on Charlie Rose, those viewers are going to be dying off, and if we don't attract some young ones, it's over.

That viewing pattern seems pretty obvious: old people who grew up with decent news shows established a lifelong habit and many continue. Younger people with other options who tune in are repulsed by what they see and choose not to watch.

So what's the problem with the shows? It seems so freaking obvious, yet they've tried a million different fixes and they never seem to address the obvious one: they're shitty storytellers. I mean, really shitty. I only check in occasionally these days--like yes, I did check Katie Couric out, and she was fine, better than fine, actually, I think she's really good. And they tried to change the show surrounding her, making it magaziney, more feature pieces and all that, but that didn't do diddly, because it's these same retched cliche-ridden pieces that tell us almost nothing, but in a magazine format. And it really doesn't matter how wonderful Katie is introducing all this crap; at some point we still have to watch the crap, and why would we?

The correspondents just seem to rely on all the same tired lines night after night, stringing together lame conventional wisdom and expressing it with a string of cliches, but worst of all, they try so hard to make it cute, or sometimes to make it cool, or sometimes funny--none of which 90% of them have any talent at. And most nauseating of all, they feel this perpetual need to tie every freaking story up with a little bow: a final line or series of lines that "puts it all in perspective," or some such twaddle, like ". . . in one small town, they are learning never to forget -- but sometimes not to remember either" or some horrible reach to sound profound or something.

For me, the defining moment of modern news was--I hate to say this, but it really was 9/11. But not in the sense that it was a watershed event or it was so important that it changed our world or blah blah blah with that nonsense. I mean that for about 24 hours, they QUIT trying to be so damn profound or cute or . . . over-produced, I guess. There was no title to the tragedy yet, and no theme music. Those are obvious hallmarks, but those are just the symptoms. What was really different, was that nobody tried to do these damn packed "stories"--they just said what the hell was happening. It was wonderful. They stopped doing the gross shit they normally do and just spoke candidly about what was happening, what they had learned, what they were finding out. No wannabee-profound bows at the end, just stripped away to no nonsense reporting. And to my utter amazement, they were really good at it.

I actually dreamed, briefly, that they would both notice the difference, and notice that it was actually much better than when they were trying to hard--or when they just didn't have the time to package it.

For a long time I thought the problem was that they were just pretty shitty storytellers, and I couldn't get why the editors or execs or whomever could not see that. (Although I wonder how much of the problem is that the "anchors" got way too much power. Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings were all made the top editors of their shows, as well. That's almost always a problem. If the people writing or creating are the same people editing--I think that fails to grasp the concept of what an editor is: someone standing a few steps outside the creation-process, who can more objectively assess, and tell you when it's not working.)

But still, why couldn't someone--say, Les Moonves--not see the problem of shitty storytelling and just tell them.

And then I saw him on Charlie Rose, addressing it, and saying off-handedly once again that the key to the news is just like sports or fiction or movies or whatever: great storytelling. And it dawned on me suddenly that he gets that, but maybe doesn't get that they're trying too hard. Maybe the format of three-minutes of spoken word is hard to tell much of a story, and/or the correspondents aren't that good at it, and they're trying to tell a beginning middle and end to something without the space to do that, and so they are getting these incredibly hokey attempts. They're OVERtelling it. They're trying to end every freaking piece with some brilliant capper line like it's the great american novel--and by the way, not noticing that most great novels don't end with thundering profundity lines--and they're screwing up by pushing the storytelling thing too hard and just producing really shitty ones.

Maybe someone just needs to tell them, "Look. It doesn't need to be clever. It doesn't need to be cute. It doesn't need a bunch of yucks--and by the way, you're not actually a comedian. It doesn't need to be revelatory every time. Just let it be what it is, tell it like it is, don't try to make it intense or dramatic or solemn or A Lesson. Just tell the freaking story naturally. Quit trying to jazz everything up."

I get the sense that they have gotten the message that it's about great storytelling, so they're overtelling every story, the first instinct to really bad writing. Somebody please tell them to stop.