(FORTUNE Magazine) – Hey, what ever happened to Tom Brokaw? How can the arguably most handsome of the network anchorpersons suddenly be in a ''ratings swoon'' (the New York Times's succinct summary)? What would cause Tom to suddenly lose control over 900,000 of the 10.7 million households previously in his thrall and get passed by Dan Rather and Peter Jennings? What has changed since last fall? Could the problem be viewer resistance to the show's shiny new $6 million set, or is that possibility logically precluded by the fact that the ratings slippage had temporal precedence over the set's inauguration? Might the slippage reflect Tom Brokaw's maddening ideological commitments? Might it turn out, as a certain party (name on request) would like to believe, that he has finally been done in by the public's getting tired of his ritualistic liberal perspective on the events of the day? Or does that line of inquiry collapse when you try to specify a dime's worth of difference, ideologywise, between Tom and the other guys? And what is one to make of the people meter factor? Might it be significant at the 95% confidence level that Brokaw's rout in the ratings coincided with the debut of revolutionary new procedures for measuring audience size, the new deal entailing a shift from diary notations entered by family members in the Nielsen population sample to a gadget that has buttons to be pushed by each and every character around the house as these parties settle in for a round of tube watching? Is Brokaw somehow being affected adversely by the admitted (by Nielsen) delinquencies in button pushing by the junior set (age 2 to 11)? What does Nielsen mean when it states ominously in a promotional brochure that it has ''taken several steps'' to get the kiddies to push their buttons? Anyway, why would Tom be more affected than Dan or Peter by the ''nonresponse bias'' complained of by numerous network biggies grousing about the meters? In the same vein, is there any reason to think that Tom will benefit disproportionately when Nielsen begins introducing ''passive components'' -- sonar and infrared sensing, for example -- that will enable the measurement system to minimize the mysteries about who is doing what with whom in the living room? Will Nielsen ever get back to a passive system as good as the one developed in the Fifties, when the modal American family reliably deployed itself in the same seats every night, just like the Three Bears, and you could actually tell who was in tubeland just by sticking this pillowlike contraption onto every seat? And why -- to continue doggedly in the interrogatory mode -- would Brokaw's show be slithering around in third place in a period when the man himself had the highest approval/disapproval rating of any network anchor, coming in at 79/8 in January (vs. 78/7 for Jennings and 66/25 for Rather), according to a Times Mirror-Gallup Survey? Why was Tom unable to capitalize on the widespread resentment against Rather when Dan was being flailed all over the place for being so manically aggressive in his famous interview with George Bush, in the wake of which NBC was suddenly featuring promos about Brokaw that kept pointing you to soothing adjectives like ''low-keyed'' and ''calm''? Will he remain calm if stuck in third place? Will the tots learn to push the button? Will Nielsen ever figure out who's doing what? One wonders, does not one?