The Philly Inquirer is a legit paper, unrelated to the National Enquirer, so this story has what could be called ‘truthiness’ to it. Dan Rather is leaving at the end of the month after 44 years of working for the Columbia Broadcasting System.
Dan Rather is 74 and has been doing the news thing for longer than some of us have been alive. The fact that he’s actually survived this long in television, is testament to something either creepy or very good. Creepy, in that like Mike Wallace, there might be an oil portrait of Dan in an attic that is aging at an incredible rate.
The reason Rather is heading somewhere else is slightly complex. First was Memogate, the story on Dubya’s questionable National Guard service in the 70’s. Seems someone didn’t do the fact checking and got caught in a complete fabrication. As Rather was the Managing Editor, meaning the one at the top of the heap, it was up to him to double and triple check that there was more than one source for the allegations. He didn’t and his ass went into the blades. This does happen to reporters.
It would seem that after that fiasco and his very public apology, the suits at CBS didn’t want him around anymore. Rather was ‘older’ and didn’t appeal to the modern, hip audience that CBS wanted to attract. Dan was benched.
The first time most people saw or heard of Dan Rather was as a reporter at the CBS affiliate in Dallas, Texas, on November 22nd, 1963. Yes, Dan goes back to the Kennedy assassination. He covered the war in Vietnam, was instrumental in breaking the Watergate story wide open on television and was known as a reporter who would go anywhere, anytime, to get the story. He would call a spade, a spade, or a thief, a thief, to their face and dare the subject to speak back.
Richard Nixon called Rather a ‘cocksucker’ on the Watergate tapes. Nixon also thought Henry Kissinger was a nice guy, so we can discount Nixon’s dislike of Dan Rather, as delusionary brain wobbling. Rather was almost as good as Mike Wallace at the door-buster piece. He’s storm in with a camera crew, jam the microphone under someone’s face and fire away, just letting film (or tape) roll, to show the subject squirm like a bug on a hotplate.
Dan Rather interviewed kings, queens and heads of state, sometimes blowing rainbows up their ass, sometimes kicking ass and taking names. His reporting from the Gulf Wars I and II, were solid, real, pieces of actual reporting, something sadly lacking in today’s pseudo-journalistic cloud of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Even Walter Cronkite respected Dan Rather. But CBS didn’t.
This is the bad part. Look around the dial for actual reporters next week, preferably reporters who are under 40 years of age.
Anderson Cooper? Please don’t make me laugh, my lips are chapped. You can see the wires that hold him upright and move his mouth. If Jim Henson had ever designed a reporter, then that’s what came out of the workshop.
John Roberts? I remember JR at City-TV doing “The New Music” on a set the size of my bedroom, playing videos from Dire Straits. He’s got all the journalistic credibility of Billy Mays for OxyClean.
Shep Smith? He’s got a good last name, but he works for FOXNews for heaven’s sake, which means he has as much to do with journalism, as I do with Economic policy in the Czech Republic.
The rest of the heads are just that, talking heads. I’m including Katie Couric, who might have journalistic chops, but has no hardcore reporter background that I can find. She’s a superlative interviewer and will do much to make CBS Evening News vaguely watchable, but not quite enough for journalism.
TV reporters, to my standard are: Cronkite, Rather, Peter Jennings, Matthew Halton, Adrienne Clarkson in her fifth estate days, Marty Seemungel, who broke the first Somalian famine stories internationally, Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace and occasionally Lou Dobbs.
The rest are meat puppets. For some of the current crop of ‘reporters’, if the prompter said “Oooga Booga Bweedelah Bweedelah…I wet my pants…We’re being attacked by spiny blue hedgehogs…Mommy didn’t love me…”, then that is what would come out of their mouths, with the appropriate intonation and mock-seriousness. Preferrably the reporter will have one hand to their earpiece to give statements of mindless nonsense the correct gravitas.
RoadDave 