Remembering Dan Rather
By Vincent Fiore (03/15/05)
“How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?” - Vice President George H.W. Bush, 1988
Some may say it’s karma, but the above comes to my mind when I look at the career of CBS longtime newsman, Dan Rather. Having served in the anchor chair of a major network longer than anyone else, Rather will forever be remembered most vividly as the major media anchor who tried to manipulate a presidential election.
Fair or not, it will be deepest furrow in Rather’s long and storied road--a road that started from the streets of Texas, and eventually led to the anchor desk of CBS and Blackrock.
“Memogate,” as the 60 Minutes broadcast of forged documents regarding President Bush’s National Guard service came to be known, was Rather’s last chance at political immortality.
Breaking a story that essentially said that a sitting president was a draft dodger--if Rather could make it stick--would have put Rather among the pantheon of latter-day greats like Cronkite, Brinkley, and Huntley.
But he could not. George W. Bush goes on to win the presidency, and Rather goes on to lose whatever credibility he had amassed in a lifetime of journalism.
After 40 years of reporting world events, Rather possesses a legacy that reads remarkably well on paper. From the assassination of JFK and the jungles of Vietnam, to the desolation of Soviet-dominated Afghanistan, Rather is much-traveled and big-story hungry.
But like George Bush Sr. in 1988 seemed to forecast what turned out to be Dan Rather’s professional epithet, those most immediate and professionally connected to Rather have judged his legacy as well.
The boys at “60 Minutes,” on which Rather will stay on as a reporter, have had their say.
Walter Cronkite, the man Rather forced out of the CBS anchor chair in 1981, said, among other things, that “it surprised quite a few people at CBS… that they tolerated his (Rather) being there for so long.”
Andy Rooney, Rather’s longtime associate and friend, said, as far back in 2002, that “I think Dan is transparently liberal.”
From around the cynical and cloistered boardrooms of the news bureaus, the consensus regarding Dan Rather is quietly one of “good riddance; you hurt us more than you helped us.”
And that seems appropriate. For years, network news has been losing its grip on America. In 1981, the near-monopolistic three of CBS, NBC, and ABC commanded 75% of the nightly viewing audience. By 2003, that figure is a telling 40%, and dropping still.
What makes Dan Rather special among this dying breed of news is that--more times than not--CBS and Rather have finished last among the alphabet media since 1993. Continuing its ascension into obscurity, CBS and Rather are down a further 10.8% in 2004. Chalk that up to Rather’s tilting at “memogate” windmills.
Network news has been and still is a liberal enclave for the sixties crowd to shape the world according to themselves. It is a selfish yet limited view of events that progressives circulate among themselves, thereby closing off all other avenues of opinion that intersect within most people’s lives.
It’s not as if the networks don’t know the story, or the other side of it ,which, in their circles, is labeled as “right wing.” They just don’t report it, because they cannot be bothered to understand the concerns of someone who happens to think differently then they do.
In the early seventies, a peculiar phenomenon known as Stockholm Syndrome was born, whereby the captives of kidnappers over time became sympathetic to their captors.
The name Stockholm Syndrome was coined in 1973 after a bank robbery-gone-bad turned into a six-day ordeal of captivity for four unlucky people. Towards the end, several of the victims resisted attempts at rescue, and even refused to testify against their captors in court.
As the American editor Elbert Hubbard once said: “Life is just one damned thing after another.”
So here we are, on the last days of Dan Rather gracing the anchor chair at CBS and providing a perspective that fewer and fewer Americans agree with. The industry known as network news faces a bleak future if not turned around, while other sources of media insert itself into the gaps left open to the public that has grown more sophisticated and savvy as to where they get their news.
One might be tempted to feel sympathy for Dan Rather and the hobbyhorse that is network news. His is a face and CBS news an institution that Americans have seen nearly every night for a generation. You wonder what the gang at Ratherbiased.com is going to do now that Dan is essentially gone.
Well, Stockholm Syndrome, for all the fascinated interest that it generates among people, is exceedingly rare, and even less commonly understood. If there are any tears or sympathetic feelings for Dan Rather’s departure from his nightly imposition upon America, they will not be from those among us that watched Rather hold an audience captive for years and spill out the bias that colored his judgment and dictated his reporting.
In the spirit of his leaving, I believe that Dan Rather will be as missed about as much as a “tornado through a trailer park.”
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