"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Rather Sad Ending
Posted 6:37 p.m., March 13, 2005
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Call it brand loyalty. I've watched the CBS Evening News since I was too young to be fully aware of what I was doing. My parents, old-line working-class Wisconsin Democrats, always made a point of turning on Walter Cronkite's newscast every night at 5:30 p.m. The national news was like one course of the evening meal. It was a lifetime habit that I never lost; I still have a preference for national over local news.
So watching the tribute to Dan Rather last week was a little like pulling out a lifetime of old memories. I remember watching with my mother the night Rather zinged president Nixon that night in Houston. (Nixon: "Are you running for something?" Rather: "No, sir. Are you?") I was eight years old. I was tuned in the night Cronkite last signed off, and the night Rather first signed on as anchor. I didn't happen to catch the 1988 firefight between Rather and then Vice President George H.W. Bush, but they aired a snippet last week.
Pretty bad, true enough, for an anchor to lose his cool and accuse a public leader of "making hypocrites of us" before the world. I can't imagine not get fired if I did something like that.
But guess what? Dan Rather might have come uncorked that night in 1988, and on several others, but he was awfully good at asking the tough questions--on that notorious night in '88 Rather was probing Bush's role in the Iran Contra scandal. And journalists should ask those types of questions when power has been abused. We've adapted to such a team sports mentality as a political culture that we seem to have lost sight of what the journalist's job really is.
Don't believe it? Recall the survey of 100,000 teens published last month showing that America's next generation feels the First Amendment goes "too far" in guaranteeing freedom of speech, press, worship and assembly. And only half felt newspapers should be allowed to publish stories without government approval.
Say what you will about him, but Dan Rather does understand the real value of those freedoms. With him out of the way, power now has one less obstacle to overcome in its perennial ambition to corner the market on information. Information, after all, is power. That's why Rather was so very powerful in his time--a time that ended abruptly last September.
I happened to have been in New York the day the fallout from the Rathergate episode started raining down. At the time, let me confess, I didn't believe that the George Bush military documents that CBS quoted likely were fakes. More likely, I thought, right-tilting blogsters were just out there banging cans loudly trying to drown out the fury the 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast stirred.
Now, it seems clear the documents were forged, and those bloggers had a point. And while the story might still have been true, without proof nothing CBS did was good enough. It's no better for Rather and CBS to defend themselves on the so-called greater truth of the story they were telling than it was for news organizations to declare vindication when that awful semen-stained dress turned out to be for real--well after most media organizations were reporting its suspected existence, without a whit of evidence.
Still, this is but one sad episode. Dan Rather has been one of the century's great reporters, someone who nudged the heights scaled by the likes of Ed Murrow in an earlier era. He perhaps wasn't the best TV news anchor, but I kept watching him after Cronkite left, partly because John Chancellor, my second favorite, went away at roughly the same time from NBC's news, and I was never a Peter Jennings guy.
I look at the sad end of Dan Rather's tenure as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News not concerned about political bias. The results of an independent investigation didn't find political bias, it found something worse. Yes, worse. Utter sloppiness, driven by paranoia that another news organization was on the same story and might break it first, costing the network ratings and money. Hurray for the capitalist cause in journalism!
I agree with that panel's findings, though that may not make the likes of my Humphrey Institute policy forum co-director Vin Weber very happy. Weber told a radio audience after the '04 election that the campaign proved to be the first time that the news media ever conspired with a presidential candidate to overthrow a sitting government. I think that's extreme. And I don't think that is what was going on.
I just think CBS blew it, and that cost Dan Rather not only his job but his standing, and his power. When a washed up anchor like Walter Cronkite can come along and bitch slap Rather to the pavement on cable news, it's clear that the mighty truly have fallen.
It was interesting that John Stewart of The Daily Show once again proved the most incisive media critic around, noting that Rather's stellar career--a career that spanned the assassination of John Kennedy to Vietnam to Tiananmen Square to 9/11, and then some--ended after he made a mistake. Cable news, Stewart mused, does that on a daily basis, with impunity.
Stewart isn't the only one who says so. I talked to Dan Froomkin, who runs the White House Briefing blog on the Washington Post's Web site. He had a great idea that cable news programs ought to institute: "I think everyone of these cable shows should end saying, 'OK, well, he said that, that was not true, and this was true and that was true. And she said that, and that was true and that was not true, and here is some vaguely authoritative support of it. ... It becomes black and white."
-- Kevin Featherly
... Kevblog note: I've been getting some letters lately about why I haven't been writing more, so I think an explanation is in order.
I've been busy, busy, busy, for one thing. I traveled almost every weekend during February, have had a string of night meetings taking up many weekday evenings, and I've had two stories due for publication. I'm playing hooky right now just doing this piece. I have some work to do for my regular job that needs to be done before I hit the rack tonight.
The other reason is that I've sort of hit the pause button. The blogosphere is becoming an increasingly bitter and rancorous place, particularly on the political side, and I'm reassessing my place in it. I call myself a blogger, true enough, but I don't consider myself particularly part of blogging culture, and I don't want to become associated with this new philosophy that seems to be based on this weird calculus: Suspicion = proof = alternative fact set.
What I am for here is something more reasoned than that. I think I've done OK at that so far, and so I'll keep working at it for now. Thanks to those who've been asking me for more.
