Dan Rather Retires

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NOTE: COMMENTS DELAYED DUE TO FLU

Dan Rather has announced his retirement as Anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News effective March 9, 2005. This will effectively mark the end of an era for network television news, an era that saw a drastic shift in popular understanding and appreciation of the role of electronic journalism.

From the radio (and early TV) days of Edward R. Murrow; through the days of Walter Cronkite, whom polls had called "America's most trusted public figure," into the era of the "liberal" media, Dan Rather becoming a poster-boy for perceived or assumed "left-wing bias," American public opinion has turned very nearly 180 degrees, from trust and support, to cynicism and opposition. This is a very strange, and ironic, thing.

Murrow was an unabashed liberal, in the original sense of the term. He was a fervent believer in Jeffersonian democracy, in the power of an informed electorate to guide the policy decisions of elected political leaders; in individual rights and liberties, in free speech, and the responsibilities of participation in the democratic process. He was a liberal, too, in a religious sense. "Branded with the consciences" of his North Carolina parents, he had a passionate committment to public service and social justice (as did many American Christians in the early and middle parts of the last century).

Cronkite, too, was something of a liberal. But he was also something of a patriot, in every sense of the word. He parachuted into Germany during WWII to cover the war for the United Press. Barely a year into his tenure as Anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, he broke into tears announcing the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the air forty-one years ago yesterday. He would boyishly shout, "Go, baby, go!" on the takeoff of an Apollo mission.

At the beginning of the American involvement in Vietnam, Cronkite was perceptibly hawkish. This, of course, was not out of line with mainstream American feelings generally. But by the time of the Tet offensive, as it was becoming clear to the American public that the war was unwinnable, in at least a conventional sense, he went on the air and told the American people, "It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate." Lyndon Johnson is widely believed to have made his decision not to run for re-election and concentrate solely on the prosecution of the war for the remainder of his Presidency on the strength of Cronkite's words. "That's it," he said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

Dan Rather has been a lightning rod for conservative and Republican criticism for most of his career. As a graduate student in Communication Arts in 1976, I wrote a paper criticizing Rather for injecting his individual personality into his news gathering and reporting (a fairly common and inevitable by-product of journalism in general, but television journalism particularly), and helping to create a "journalism of celebrity." I cited, specifically, Rather's un-journalistic behavior towards Richard Nixon at a press conference in 1974. When called upon by the President to ask a question, Rather (who had been among television's more aggressive pursuers of Watergate charges) was greeted by a standing ovation of the assembled press corps. Trying, clumsily, to be charming, Nixon asked, "Why, Mr. Rather, are you running for something?" "No, Mr. President," Rather shot back, "Are you?"

I was no fan of Richard Nixon. Rather's behavior--from a journalistic point of view--was inappropriate, and foreshadowed the time (NOW) when personality, looks, and celebrity trump education, training, and experience as "journalistic" qualities. That was my problem, however, with Dan Rather. Not that he is a "liberal" or "biased" (except in the sense that journalism is never entirely objective, and that objectivity is a functional impossibility), but that he represented a growing trend in TV news that I was unhappy about--journalism of celebrity.

Rather's decision to leave the anchor chair next year was probably inevitable, and certainly a result of his and CBS's uncharacteristic lack of diligence in this year's election coverage (specifically, the story of Bush's "AWOL" status during Vietnam-era National Guard service). Frankly, I will not miss him. But I do not watch television news.

I read.