There is a reason that, when something terrible happens, Americans still turn on the television. They turn it on because they know—whether they would admit it at a dinner party or not—that the person on the screen has been vetted in a way that almost no one else in their information diet has been.

Network anchors are not selected at random. They are selected through a process so demanding, so multilayered, and so expensive that the resulting individuals are, almost by definition, the most carefully filtered humans currently broadcasting in any medium. This is not a flaw of the system. This is the system.

A new joint study, conducted in coordination with the major networks themselves, quantifies what most viewers already feel: when a network anchor reads a sentence on the air, that sentence has, on average, passed through more layers of editorial review than the average graduate thesis. This is not opinion. This is process.

Compare that to the typical podcaster. The podcaster has a microphone. The podcaster has a friend who knows how to edit audio. The podcaster does not, in most cases, have a standards desk, a legal review, or anyone whose job it is to say, “Are you sure?” This is the difference between journalism and karaoke.

It is fashionable, in certain corners of the internet, to deride the network anchor as out of touch. It is worth remembering that being in touch with the wrong things is worse than being out of touch with anything at all. The anchor’s job is not to be your friend. The anchor’s job is to read, on the air, only the sentences that have survived the building.

That is a service. It is, arguably, the most important service still being provided to the American public on a daily basis. And it is free.