BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Thursday, March 10, 2005
RATHER'S FAREWELL. Dan
Rather's final night as anchor of The CBS Evening News was
more engaging than I thought it would be. Like most people under 60,
I rarely watch any of the network newscasts. My principal broadcast
news source is NPR, because it comes to me where I am: in my car,
creeping to or from Media Log Central.
Thus my main exposure to Dan, Tom,
and Peter over the years has been during major news events and
election nights. Rather's newscast last night was hardly a historic
moment. His "courage" sign-off struck me as a less-than-successful
attempt to recontextualize one of his weirder moments from years
past.
But the hour-long special that
followed, Dan
Rather: A Reporter Remembers,
was a reminder that despite Rather's well-documented shortcomings,
the guy has been there for just about every big story since 1960s -
from the Galveston hurricane, to the assassination of John Kennedy,
to Vietnam, and on through Watergate, Iran-contra, his "Gunga Dan"
moment in Afghanistan, right up through and beyond 9/11. If I'm not
mistaken, he was the last journalist to interview Saddam Hussein, and
from what I can recall, it was a reasonably tough interview, given
that his subject could have ordered him to be dismembered at any
moment.
At one point our 14-year-old son,
Tim, said to me that it seemed like Rather had been there for every
major event of the 20th century. Well, by the time the hour reached
its closing moments it certainly seemed that way.
As you might expect, the
retrospective was not exactly an honest and hard-hitting look at
Rather's career. Rather explained two of his most famous lapses - his
self-indulgent "No, Mr. President, are you?" retort to Richard Nixon,
and his unnecessarily combative interview with George H.W. Bush - as
the inevitable consequence of his "passion." Well, gosh darn, I guess
Rather's biggest fault was that he just cared too much.
The program also repeated the clip
of Rather personally apologizing for relying on apparently phony
documents in the 60 Minutes story on George W. Bush's National
Guard service last September. That story pretty obviously hastened
Rather's retirement, the numerous denials notwithstanding. Somehow,
though, the broadcast omitted the bombshell in the
Thornburgh-Boccardi report that Rather later took
back his apology. The
standup guy sat down.
Walter Cronkite's timing was awful,
but he was right when he told CNN this week that Bob Schieffer, not
Rather, should
have replaced him 24 years
ago. Schieffer will now have his chance, though it's likely to last
only for a year or two - if that long.
Still, Rather will be missed. He
was a link between the great World War II-era television journalists
such as Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow and the modern period of
downsizing, celebrity, and sensation. Unfortunately, given the
direction in which television news has been traveling, we're likely
to miss Rather before too long. Courage.
GLOBAL CIRCULATION. I have
not written one word about the circulation scandal that has hit
several daily newspapers during the past year or. It's arcane and
insidery, and has nothing to do with the media issues that I care
about. And I pretend to zero expertise on the subject.
This
Editor & Publisher story,
though, is interesting - well, okay, not much, but the Prudential
study it cites has some harsh things to say about the Boston
Globe's circulation practices, and that's at least mildly
interesting.
posted at 6:55 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
