Not long after I came to Wash ington to work as a junior editorial flunky, I went to a cocktail party at a think tank. (Attending cocktail parties at think tanks, I thought then, was one of the great perks of my job, which tells you all you need to know about the life of a junior editorial flunky.) There I met a fellow flunky--a flunkiette, you might call her, since she was even greener than I was, and much, much blonder. Her thankless job was to write speeches, op-eds, position papers, and other encyclicals under the name of the think tank's president. She was a ghost, in other words. A flunkiette ghost.

Comparing notes, we both mentioned our admiration for the wit, prose style, and intellectual range of a well-known newspaper columnist.

"He's the best," I said.

"Fabulous," she agreed.

Then, after a brief pause and a puzzled look, she said: "I wonder who writes his stuff."

That was 20 years ago, and when it comes to famous journalists, especially of the TV variety, the question haunts us still. Just last week a spokesman for CBS News revealed that an episode of "Katie Couric's Notebook," a one-minute video commentary distributed daily to CBS affiliates and posted on the CBS website, "was based on" a column by Jeffrey Zaslow that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal. "Was based on" is a euphemism used by TV people meaning "was stolen from." According to the spokesman, Katie "was horrified" to discover that the words

No, wait--that can't be right. When she spoke and published the words, Katie had to know they weren't her own. When the words came out of her mouth, she thought they were the work of someone she had hired to put them there. In TV this someone is called a "producer," and several of them--very young, by all accounts, and most of them women--work at writing the commentaries that Katie presents as her "Notebook."

They are weightless little leaves, these commentaries. From the standard opening (Hi, everyone!) to the standard close (That's a page from my notebook), each runs to 160 words. As frontman for a corporate behemoth that relies for its revenue on the goodwill, or at least the toleration, of the vast, various, and extremely touchy American public, Katie can never express an opinion that might inspire someone to object. This lends her Notebook an anodyne quality. The subject matter ranges widely, but the treatment is uniformly mild. If, for example, the topic is teen promiscuity or the severely obese ("it's a growing problem, and the ones who are growing are us!" Katie opined), she views it with alarm, but the alarm is muted; if it's Al Gore's crusade against global warming, she lends her support, though with no particulars; if the subject is war and humanity's inclination to violence, she casts her eyes heavenward and wonders when, please God, it will all end. Not that she mentions God, or casts her eyes heavenward.