As the media elites paid tribute to Peter Jennings last week an hour-after-hour gush-fest that sorely pressed the newsworthiness of his passing you couldn’t help but wonder whether some of the old-timers were really paying respects to their own dying trade.

Jennings was an extraordinary broadcaster who infused a calming influence on the really big stories a gift that gave him celebrity and riches well beyond what most working-stiff journalists could imagine. It also placed him among an insular group of New York-based media elites who get to determine what is worth reporting to tens of millions of people watching the evening news and what isn’t.

Now that’s power as Walter Cronkite realized in 1968 when he came back from Vietnam and told his viewers that the war was basically a losing proposition.

But nightly news shows are not what they once were. These days, they have a combined audience of 25 million, down from 37 million in 1991. Cronkite, of course, is long gone and so is his progeny Rather, Brokaw and now, sadly, Jennings. The networks’ evening news operations are all playing second fiddle to the morning shows, and while none of them are about to be dropped from the schedule for now anyway the landscape has surely changed.

Those of a certain age will remember sitting in front of the set at 6:30 or 7 each evening to see what Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley had to say about the events of the day. In retrospect, there was plenty of dull reportage Congressional hearings and overseas features that were filmed days before and then flown to New York for editing but there were also civil rights marches and assassinations and Vietnam and Watergate. In our family, as in many others, it was unthinkable not to watch the evening news.

Nowadays, broadcast journalism is a shell of its former self veritable scavenger operations, really. Domestic and foreign bureaus have been decimated. The softer feature stuff is almost always a rehash of magazine and newspaper reports that appeared days or weeks earlier. For anyone with access to Yahoo or AOL, it’s a snooze-fest.

An unchallenging snooze-fest. When those Ohio marines were killed in Iraq the other week, the networks worked up their perfunctory reaction stories from friends and family. But what about investigating how hundreds of millions of dollars are being misspent (or likely pilfered) in the Iraqi rebuilding effort, or the strong-arm tactics of Army recruiters trying to snag unsuspecting kids into military service?

This is real journalism, but it’s of little interest to the folks now running network news. Why? It’s not a matter of money the cost of investigative reporting pales next to many network operations. And for all the hand-wringing about making enemies with the Federal Communications Commission, it’s probably not about politics either.

A more likely explanation is that in-depth reporting the kind you still see on “Frontline” or occasionally “60 Minutes” is considered an audience turn-off. And unlike 30 or 40 years ago, network executives now consider what the audience wants to see far more important than what they need to see.

Another big difference: the talent pool. How to say this delicately: Network reporters are hired because they’re young, good looking and have mastered the craft of broadcast-speak not because they would know a good story if it hit them in the rear end.

Who knows how Peter Jennings really felt about the steady degradation of his craft. During a forum late last year that featured all three network anchors, he diplomatically acknowledged regret that not enough skepticism was raised about whether Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction. “I think we’ve all had some serious second thoughts as to whether we were as on the ball as we should have been,” he said.

Yeah, but no one at ABC had the fortitude to act on those second thoughts not Jennings, not ABC News President David Westin, and certainly not ABC-Disney Television Group President Anne Sweeney. For all the reflections we have heard on the life and times of Peter Jennings, maybe there should be a few moments carved out about that sad reality.

*Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).