Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Rather’s journalism legacy still uncertain


Rather
 (The Spokesman-Review)
David Bauder Associated Press

NEW YORK – As his final evening newscast approaches on Wednesday, Dan Rather is seeing the indignities pile up as quickly as the roses that were tossed in the path of Tom Brokaw when the NBC anchorman stepped down late last year.

The latest came in a New Yorker magazine article, where fellow CBS News legends Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace talked about how difficult it was to watch Rather as an anchor.

The embattled Rather is left fighting for something largely beyond his control – his reputation. Will his role in last fall’s discredited story about President Bush’s military service overshadow his 50-year career?

“With the passing of time, that immediate sourness will pass and people will say, ‘God, Rather did that for 40-plus years,’ ” said Tom Bettag, a former Rather deputy who is now executive producer of ABC News’ “Nightline.” “When you get paid a lot of money, like a basketball player, people don’t realize how hard it is. The amount of effort he poured into what he genuinely believed was a public trust was stunning.”

Often, however, last impressions are the lasting ones.

“It is going to loom large,” said Alex Jones, director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy. “Over time, this is something that will be put in better perspective, especially if he has another chapter in his career.”

Rather leaves without a victory lap. America’s most popular anchorman in the 1980s, Rather and the “CBS Evening News” have been third in the ratings behind NBC and ABC for several years. In a relatively slow news period, the CBS ratings have declined twice as much as its ABC and NBC competitors this season.

CBS hasn’t decided who will ultimately replace Rather – Bob Schieffer begins as a temporary stand-in Thursday – and management hasn’t consulted the outgoing anchor during its deliberations.

In a series of news reports leading up to his departure, Rather has tried to keep the focus on stories he’s reported for CBS, a long list that dates back to President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. He wants to be remembered as a hard-bitten reporter who wasn’t tied to the anchor desk, and CBS recently distributed a timeline of his career that’s a travelogue of world hot spots.

In January alone, he logged more frequent flier miles than most business travelers do in years: to Indonesia for tsunami coverage, to Washington for President Bush’s inauguration, to Iraq for the elections.

Yet his critics continue to hound Rather’s trail. The Web site Ratherbiased.com, which for several years has parsed his words for political meaning, posted a “countdown clock” of the minutes until he signs off.

One of his career’s memorable moments echoes oddly in the current context. During a live 1988 interview about the Iran-contra scandal, then-Vice President George Bush angrily recalled Rather storming off the evening news set after a tennis match cut into time set aside for the evening news.

“It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran,” Bush said. “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?”