CBS has decided not to decide, at least for now, what to do with the Evening News. Or with itself. There are noises again about its merging or joining forces somehow — strategically, in business terms, somehow — with CNN, and that would make a lot of sense. Before that, it may turn itself into ABC World News Tonight, ’70s style, with some kind of multiple anchor format, only instead of Peter Jennings, Max Robinson and Frank Reynolds, it’ll be . . . well, that’s not really clear. Possible anchors have included current CBS employees Scott Pelley and former VJ John Roberts . . . whom Canuckleheads of a certain age will always think of as J.D. Roberts.
But of this much we can be sure: Dan Rather is on his way out . . . eventually. Why Dan Rather has remained as the anchor of the Evening News for as long as he has remains a mystery. His being chosen to succeed Walter Cronkite seemed strange when it happened. And the longer Dan did the job, the stranger a decision it seemed. Right at the beginning of his tenure, there was his deeply weird and never explained nightly broadcast-concluding valediction. Rather, apparently, was seeking some kind of signature line on the order of Walter Cronkite’s “And that’s the way it is.” What he came up with was the exhortation, “Courage.” Nobody except Dan knew what led him to choose that; Dan never explained it, and there wasn’t anything in the early 1980s that seemed dire enough to warrant it. (The Iranian hostages were free; Reagan was in the White House, it was “morning in America,” after all, so what was there to be afraid of? There was the Evil Empire, but it wasn’t appreciably scarier than it had been previously. There was a sudden rush of fear-mongering about nuclear vaporization that hadn’t been as prevalent since about 30 years previously. But none of that explained, singly or in aggregate, why people might be so terrified that they’d need to have somebody sternly exhort them to be courageous.) But “Courage” it was . . . at first. Then Dan started to change it up, opting for the Spanish “Cu-rah-hey.” Shortly after that, mercifully, it stopped altogether, just as mystifyingly as it had started.
But that was just one example of Rather-related strangeness. There was the Chicago cab kidnapping: Dan was supposed to interview Studs Terkel, but never showed up for the interview, and said he’d been kidnapped by a rogue taxi driver who wouldn’t let him out of the cab. Dan couldn’t offer anything in the way of identification that might help the cops find or apprehend the alleged perpetrator. There was “Gunga Dan,” when Dan dressed up as a mujahadeen fighter of the kind that — at that time — was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. He looked like Dan Rather in a not-terribly-convincing Afghan disguise. His speaking English with a Texan accent didn’t help sell the illusion either.
A few years after that, Dan was jumped on the street in New York by a guy who beat him while screeching “What is the frequency, Kenneth?”
There was the tennis tantrum: coverage ran long, Dan got annoyed, stomped off the set, the tennis ended and the network went to black for eight minutes while, doubtless, some poor editorial assistant was dispatched to find Dan and get him wired up and back in his anchor chair. That incident got thrown back in his face by an embattled George H.W. Bush. Dan pressed him on his knowledge of the Iran-Contra situation until George — eager to disprove “wimp” mutterings — snapped, “How would you like it if I judged your career by the eight minutes you walked off the air?” The whole stupid collision made them both look bad.
History and his son have made George H.W. Bush look better and better. Dan Rather just got a little weirder and a little more tarnished with each new year and each new inexplicable spasm of bizarre behavior . . . like his odd descent into a kind of blind alley of bad syntax, tortured metaphor and overwrought Texas folksiness on election night in 2000. The longer the night wore on and the tighter and less obvious the results became, the more baroque and parodic Dan’s descriptions got.
And now he’s all mashed up in this memo mess and headed for retirement. (Although, at 72, it’s not like he’s being shoved out early; he’s already outlasted his predecessor — Walter had to retire at 65.) The biggest irony here is that for once, the bad and/or weird behavior is not Dan’s. In this case, he was just the hapless meat puppet fronting a second-rate attempt to nail George W. Bush on his Texas Air National Guard service or lack thereof. And the people who made the decisions to trust the fake documents, to interview and take at face value all the comments from the cranks with some kind of vindictive ulterior motives are all squawking and refusing to leave, even though the 224-page report indicts them pretty squarely and indisputably. Mary Mapes and her lieutenants feel they’re being unfairly singled out, even though the panel that investigated the whole mess did a much more thorough and careful job investigating their shoddy work and half-assed methods than Mapes et al managed as producers and/or reporters.
All the carping by people on the right about the supposed liberal bias of CBS and Dan Rather has never made much sense, and they’ve never been able to offer anything that seemed convincing as evidence of this bias. Dan Rather’s whole act is so strange and twitchy and wrapped too tight — and has been for so long — that it’s work just trying to parse what obvious, factual points he’s trying to get across, never mind how he might be shading them subtle bias.
Not that a lot of the carping by right-wing types about the media ever makes much sense, and there’s never any concrete evidence. Besides, if Fox News Channel and Ann Coulter are alternatives to liberal bias, I’ll just have to accept liberal bias as part of the package, since apparently being fair and balanced also means being shrill, opinionated and fact-free.
We just had a month of free FNC as part of the cable company’s marketing push. The problem isn’t its tilt or lack thereof, it’s how little actual news it offers. Mostly it’s talk shows, the highest-rated of which is the one fronted by tiresome scold Bill O’Reilly, whose primary rhetorical gambit seems to consist of yelling at people to shut up. The papers from his now-settled sexual harassment lawsuit suggest that when he’s yelling “shut up,” O’Reilly is comparatively eloquent. At least that’s less creepy than the kinds of things he apparently says to producers on whom he has a crush.
I don’t think the Air America all-liberal radio all the time is really the answer, either. As with anything conceived to serve an ideological agenda, it’s dull because it’s predictable; it’s too easy to see where it’s going; it’s like listening to a comedian tell old, badly-written jokes. You know the punch lines will make you groan, and you figure them out long before the comedian gets to them.
The other problem here is what passes for “liberal” and conservative” in most of these considerations. The conservatives appear to be a bunch of meddlesome, moralistic and hypocritical haranguers (O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher) and the liberals come across like smug, self-satisfied dolts who are naïve and credulous and just as meddlesome and hypocritical.
Why doesn’t P.J. O’Rourke have a talk show? At least he’s reasonably well-informed, curious about things and funny.
But he doesn’t. And unfortunately, that’s the way it is.
