I have a problem with commercial TV news. I don't want it delivered to me via crimson lips and fancy coiffures. I don't like the way the TV babes compress sometimes urgent and ongoing matters into a few barely coherent sentences that simply fail to reflect events with any semblance of their true complexity. They are about as credible as the ads for the exercise machines with which they share the airways. They have neither the time nor the talent to offer trustworthy accounts of the matters on which they claim knowledge. They diminish the idea of journalism.

So why should we take any notice of these young women (and many of the men) who know little about the world and who have little apparent competence in collecting, assembling, and interpreting information? And why do these walking, talking cliches seem to be increasingly dominating commercial TV news?

The second question is the easiest to answer. It's just because they are cheap to employ and their material is cheap to broadcast. They pour out of undistinguished universities with mickey-mouse diplomas in media studies and communications and narcissistic personalities and egos bigger than Tokyo. The prospect, however distant, of public recognition, of celebrity, is their cocaine. They are fodder for TV newsrooms looking for eye-candy rather than durable journalistic talent that costs money. It's all a matter of getting a few tightly edited shots from the camera and showing the babe rattling off a few sentences of ''script''. Then it's back to the funeral insurance ads.

And we take notice because often we have little choice. They are what is on the public menu and they reflect what the networks assume the public wants. If so, what the public wants are cute naifs whose intellectual and emotional range is limited mainly to confected shock, horror and outrage when confronted by the pedestrian if awful events that they cover. Somebody needs to explain to them that the world is not created anew every day, that there is little that is new under the sun, and that restraint and curiosity can be useful journalistic tools.

They might also be directed to ABC and SBS TV where they can find role models whose outstanding work shows how the job should be done. They might look to people like Marian Wilkinson, Sally Sara, Heather Ewart, Emma Alberici, Geraldine Doogue, Karen Middleton and a raft of other female TV journalists of high quality and intelligence. They might look to formidable print and radio journalists like Michelle Grattan, Laura Tingle and Fran Kelly. All of these women are respected and admired and often courageous; Grattan, Doogue and Sara have received Australian honours. They inhabit a universe above and beyond the tinsel tawdriness of the commercial babes.