Over in Slate, Troy Patterson offers an argument that seems to have started out only half-serious but becomes pretty compelling as he marches away through the network’s news-related programing. Katie Couric is obviously not enjoying the job, CBS Sunday Morning is moribund, The Early Show is fluff etc. etc.:

A brief word about CBS Sunday Morning: While it is obvious that this network’s coverage and presentation of current events is geared toward old people, the target audience of Charles Osgood’s show seems to be already dead—peacefully so.

Patterson also lights out on the sacred cow that is 60 Minutes:

We’re supposed to have some respect for 60 Minutes and I’m not entirely sure why that is. The most recent episode began with a Lara Logan piece on a Special Forces unit in Afghanistan. It was teased as a tale of valor that would also expose why we are losing in Afghanistan. In reality, it only addressed one of these topics. Guess which! Recounting a battle between the Green Berets and the Taliban, Logan—whose hair was mussed, which I take to be a considered choice—gave us a boys’ adventure story of the old school. It takes nothing away from the courage and sacrifice of these soldiers to say that the segment was an encyclopedia of war-story treacle: “I thought, ‘If I’m going down, I’m taking them with me,’ ” and so on.

The reason we’re supposed to have respect for 60 Minutes is that it does occasionally do actual strong journalism but it’s also true that 80 percent of the time, when you tune in, there’s nothing like strong journalism on the show. My pet peeve are the puffy profiles; the 60 Minutes angle is to give viewers the same fluff the lighter shows do, but with a patina of seriousness. The correspondents gaze quizzically at some celebrity, screwing their face up to get ready to ask an insipid question in a very hard-hitting way: “Was working with Steven the best experience of your professional life?”

But the show is such a hit it will never go away. But that can’t be said for the rest of the news division. There are of course many talented journalists working there, but at this point, even the fretting about the effects of cost-cutting on the division is a decades old routine, going back to the Lawrence Tisch and Westinghouse years.

There are two cable channels that provide fairly strong news coverage available to anyone in the country not too cheap to lay out for basic cable, so CBS News has no raison d’etre when it comes to breaking news. It also means that its reporting staff is comparatively puny. The company has virtually no web presence. While there is patently no one there with the programming smarts to figure out how to contend in the modern world, it’s also rue that there is no answer to the network’s big problem: It’s flagship show offers a product—a digest of the stories of the day wrapped up in a cute little package at 6:30 p.m.—that no one wants any more. CBS News is basically a typewriter.