Risky business? The broadcasts are mostly sizzle, not steak, so it's no surprise that Katie Couric and Meredith Vieira got their new jobs. But what if they had been plain?

So Meredith Vieira is giddy, and Katie Couric has taken to dressing like a nun. We notice these things because they're paid, exorbitantly, to be noticed.

Couric and Vieira are being marketed like rock stars, which, in a medium surprisingly short of them, they are. Their debuts were reviewed like opening nights, as though they were one-shot deals, when the point is to build enduring audience loyalty. Their appearance and behavior are surgically dissected, too, demonstrating, yet again, that women are held to higher standards, and more criticism, than men.

Some analysts see the moves as risky, when they are anything but.

It seems obvious - expensive, but obvious - to hire morning television's largest personality to anchor the evening news, or shift one popular morning host to another program.

The shocker would have been to hire the unknown, the untested or, heaven forbid, the female equivalent of Charlie Gibson.

Then again, Brian Williams is as dapper as a Van Heusen shirt model, Anderson Cooper sold Vanity Fair covers, and the late Peter Jennings was straight out of central casting, though no one seems to ever go on about their clothes. (Well, there was Dan Rather's vest.) New anchors have become as much personalities as reporters. Their job is to seduce us into watching.

Couric's ascent is being treated as earth-shattering, which is absurd when Condoleezza Rice is our second female secretary of state.

It's not astonishing that there's only one female anchor of a network newscast. It's astonishing that there's only one female Supreme Court justice out of nine.

No, the surprise isn't that Couric is an anchor but that it took so long.

The commercial networks have ceded serious reporting to print, the PBS NewsHour, and NPR, the exception being breaking news. Their "in-depth" reports last three minutes. Ted Koppel's gone.

The broadcasts are about flash, dazzling visuals, your money, your health - you! - ending with a feature about someone overcoming some hardship to do something good.

Network newscasts are Good Housekeeping with a dash of war feeds, a pinch of presidential sound bites.

The news was already softened, sugarcoated so the bad stuff would be easier to chew and medicated to serve an aging viewership, underwritten by a parade of pharmaceutical ads. Like the good girl she appears, Couric asked viewers to suggest her sign-off (imagine Rather doing the same) and thanks them "so very much" for tuning in.