Indeed, Hockenberry's career is a weird mixture of the traditional -- even the nostalgic -- and a search for the postmodern, high-concept, and experimental.

Paralyzed at 19 from the nipples down when he hitches a ride from a girl who falls asleep at the wheel, he gets a ceta grant to be a local correspondent for NPR in Eugene, Oregon (we marvel together at the age of liberal government). At 25, with a high-school debater's voice, he goes to Washington to write and deliver the news for "All Things Considered." He becomes NPR's weekend reporter during the Reagan years, then NPR's Jerusalem correspondent. He covers the fall of Ceausescu, is on the front line during the Gulf War, then in the Kurdish refugee camps after the war.

It used to be that such postings, and demonstration of journalistic courage, made you. That's the nostalgic part.

He launches two groundbreaking shows on NPR: "Heat" and "Talk of the Nation." Then he goes to ABC. He's promised longform magazine stuff and joins the Forrest Sawyer show, Day One, which, shortly, is "crunched between the jaws of Cap Cities and Roone Arledge." He finds himself on Sunday morning with Willow Bay.

In the new television age of cable and takeovers, he pitches, wildly, "a morning documentary show to Fox . . . the camera is the character . . . the more cameras you can get out there the more stories you can have . . . and then a show just about elections . . . elections everywhere, an orgy of elections . . . elections like sports . . . total horse race . . . and then cameras in reporters' offices . . . voyeuring on the media. . . . " He recounts a dinner at Le Bernardin, where the "GNP of Cameroon went across our table," pitching "my heart out." But then, two weeks later, Fox is hiring Roger Ailes and off in a different direction (Fox, Hockenberry points out, has been so successful and made stars out of people "you wouldn't let onto a jury" because it has re-created the Cold War. That is its powerful message: They're coming; only Bill O'Reilly can save us).

He goes to NBC, gets a berth among the many people berthed at Dateline. He starts one of the first MSNBC shows, Edgewise -- "Charlie Rose meets The War Room." But it's a weekly show, and suddenly everybody found out only a daily show had any stick on cable. Canceled. Two years later, he's back with Hockenberry, his daily show, which starts with impeachment, runs into Kosovo, follows into Columbine, and then . . . nothing. No news. Suddenly the numbers all over the dial start heading to zero. The format changes again, it's Headliners and Legends . . . Time and Again . . . hour-long biographies . . . and Hockenberry is canceled (it may not have helped that one night, in his daily "question of the day" segment, Hockenberry's question was: "How badly does cable news suck?").

As it happens, Hockenberry's career is not terribly different from most media, or content, careers in a deregulated world. It is an unregulated free-for-all. And while Hockenberry may, in his television heart, be hoping against hope for the anchor call, the truth is he is very good at what he does -- which is to make it up as you go along.

Last week, Ted Koppel confronted Michael Eisner in a sit-down with the Washington bureau of ABC News, maintaining that the news division should be spared personnel cuts because some of its correspondents had been killed abroad. Indeed, Koppel quizzed Eisner about whether he knew the name of an ABC reporter killed in Bosnia.

Eisner is said to have replied -- no doubt very reasonably, in his mind -- that he could not even exempt Disney animators from the coming cuts.

I have been trying to think about the disconnect here -- and the disconnect is very clearly Koppel's more than Eisner's.

Does Koppel, like Hewitt, reside in another media world? A preserved space? Does this go to Hockenberry's Cold War point -- news once had a special function and newspeople were a protected class?

Since it is obvious that the Koppel-Hewitt world is not returning, however boldly Koppel takes on his boss (indeed, what must Eisner have thought?), perhaps it's better to get rid of people who think it might be -- to officially, more or less, acknowledge that news, as we know it, no longer exists. And that, therefore, it's every newsman for himself.

Anyway, I'm reading Hockenberry's novel. Not a television person's book at all. Not a brand extension -- but a first novel, all about place, politics, good and evil, violence. And Chinook salmon. If you can't do nonfiction, do you go to fiction?

Or do you get a reality game show of your own?

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com

Is there a future for TV's talking heads? Talk with "This Media Life" columnist Michael Wolff in an online chat Wednesday, April 25, at 8 p.m. on newyorkmag.about.com.

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