Those of an age to remember when Uncle Walter relinquished the reins to Dan the Man might feel a little saddened about the latter leaving the anchor desk this week.
Walter Cronkite, after all, defined for us the nature of news consumption in the boob-tube era. He was, in his way, the avuncular oracle of the nascent image-world, the steady and cathedral interpreter of flickering film from Selma and Saigon. The advent of the Eye and its accompanying clatter of teletype was a signal moment in the day, the sobering summons to a secular evensong. You put down your fork, closed your math textbook, stopped teasing your little sister and paid heed. Through the clutter of Rifleman reruns and Juicy Fruit jingles, Uncle Walter had arrived to tell you the way it was.
It cannot be entirely Dan Rather's fault that this is no longer the way it is. We knew as he slipped into that chair 24 years ago that he was no Cronkite, that he was more heart-on-sleeve. The clip of Cronkite doffing his specs to daub a tear has joined the iconography of the Kennedy assassination, along with John-John stepping forward to salute his daddy's casket. More than one commentator has traced the turn of public opinion about Vietnam to Cronkite pronouncing it unwinnable one night on the Evening News.
That breach of "objectivity" was all the more potent for its rarity. And maybe that's why few look fondly upon the clips of Rather challenging Richard Nixon or Bush père. Then, of course, came the dubious Guard-records affair, forever to mark Rather's retirement as retreat. Even Uncle Walter, who anointed his successor, has chimed in with the unkindest cut, saying Rather appeared to viewers to be "playing a role of newsman."
This quote, along with those of colleagues who prefer watching Rather's rivals, hails from media analyst Ken Auletta's report in the March 7 New Yorker on Rather's clouded and year-early departure. Next March 9 would have marked 25 years precisely, but instead of a gold watch, Rather gets a one-hour special and steel-tipped boot. Auletta makes clear what we have long known: that Rather is awkward and uncomfortable at the anchor desk; that he is prone to sentiment and showboating; that his folksy Texasisms wear thin.
But Auletta also shows that CBS hired and promoted Rather for his drama-king flair, counting on a dynamic personality to keep Americans eyeing the Eye. And Rather delivered, whether he was shouting in a hurricane or crouching with missile-slinging Mujahadeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The recent piling-on obscures the fact that he has compiled an enviable career. The problem was that Rather was, by his own account and ambition, a reporter, not an anchor.
American network news had inflated the anchor role from newsreader to "personality," making what should have been a reporter's nightmare job the plum for which all correspondents strive. Perhaps Cronkite to some extent is responsible for that, although surely he did not intend to be oracular. It is an honor to be the trusted fount of information in a national crisis, but most days the anchor is, or should be nothing more than a presenter.
Oddly, in the episode that brought him down, Rather apparently was spared the ultimate disgrace of dismissal by being an anchor of sorts, reading prepared questions. Not so producer Mary Mapes, who was fired by network president Les Moonves upon receipt in January of a report analyzing the flawed Bush-records piece, aired by 60 Minutes Wednesday last September. The Independent Review Panel, whose most prominent member was former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, concluded that CBS News, in its haste to break a story, had not properly vetted its reporting and had stood by the story too long.
Auletta notes, however, as too few observers have, that the panel could not establish either a political bias or that the documents cited in the 60 Minutes Wednesday piece, allegedly confirming Lt. Bush had failed to show for physicals and had been grounded from flying, were indeed fake. What's more, the 60 Minutes Wednesday report also had an on-camera admission by a former Texas lieutenant governor that he had helped get Bush in the Guard. Once the crap hit the blogosphere, however, the idea developed that the whole story about Bush's cushy Guard stint was false.
It was not. But Mapes got canned, three other CBS News veterans are waging legal battles to keep their jobs and Rather limps toward the shadowy denouement of an otherwise remarkable career. He is not solely responsible for The CBS Evening News' longtime third-place status. Years of corporate cost-cutting and poor affiliate lead-ins helped turn the flagship of the Tiffany Network into a Wal-Mart greeter.
Yet Auletta tantalizes with the notion that Rather's early exit marks an opportunity. Moonves wants to garner younger viewers with a snappier, faster-paced show, while CBS News President Andrew Heyward seeks more time for correspondents to present longer stories, de-emphasizing the anchor. It sounds counterintuitive, but serious inquiry into national policies and events could be network news' answer to ill-informed blog blather. In a media universe with few choices between quarrel and wonkery, a savvy, nightly collation of image and fact could triumph.
"I have tried to speak truth to power," Rather tells Auletta. If CBS News finds the right voice—well, roughly 48.5 percent of Americans might tune in for that.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.