This comes under the category of "Someone's gotta say it." To me, the saddest part of the whole tale of the Dan Rather and the bogus letters is not that CBS News was embarrassed. I think every major news outlet ought to be embarrassed about a number of things they've proffered as legit the last few years. Nor is it that Bush supporters have probably been able to convince some folks that because one chunk of evidence was phony, a lot of the charges about the man's National Guard Service have to be phony, as well.
No, what saddens me is that this is how Dan Rather, who was once a very good reporter, is going to go out. I hate the idea of retiring people just because they get old, but it's been a long time since Dan Rather has been Dan Rather. Just as politicans who are around too long start to look like the David Levine caricature and sound like the Dana Carvey impression, so it is with newsmen. Their quirks intensify and they become lampoons of themselves. At least a decade ago, someone should have lovingly tapped Mr. Rather on the shoulder and told him it was time to become a Special Correspondent, doing essays and nostalgia pieces like Mr. Cronkite.
Rather once earned his nickname of "the reporter the White House hates" but he earned it fair-and-square — by broadcasting stories that showed that government officials (at the time, Nixon and his mob) were fibbing to us. We should all be in favor of the press doing that, and not just when we want to see the current regime tossed out of office. Or at least, we should be in favor of it when the reports stand the test of time, and it did turn out that Rather was largely right, and the Nixon Administration was largely wrong. Still, Rather has never been as good at the anchor desk as he was asking tough questions of those in power.
His rise from field reporter to anchor and editor-in-chief of The CBS Evening News owed a lot to his enemies. Rabid Conservative groups circulated petitions and pressured advertisers to get him removed from his post as White House Correspondent. CBS had a normal "tour-of-duty" schedule and Rather was due to be rotated to another assignment…but they kept him on the White House beat longer than planned, just because they didn't want to be perceived as giving in to that campaign. Later, when Walter Cronkite announced his retirement, the choice came down to Mudd or Rather, and rumor has it that CBS felt Mudd was better suited to the job. But again, Rather's critics were crusading against him and again, CBS didn't want them to be able to claim they influenced the decision. Reportedly, the network toyed with splitting the job between Mudd and Rather, but Mudd balked at sharing so they gave the whole thing to Rather. If Rather's detractors had only shut up, he probably wouldn't have landed the (then) most prestigious post in the news business, and CBS wouldn't have kept him in it to this day.
The last decade or so, he's gotten…weird. It isn't just the odd, folksy bromides or the mounting seriousness or even the crying on Letterman. It's just that he's become this robotic presence who makes every story sound the same, and who seems way too detached from the human side of whatever he reports. In all likelihood, he was due for retirement soon, just because of the way CBS News has atrophied the last half-dozen years. Alas, now that Conservatives are again calling for his head, he'll probably stay around longer just to deny them their victory. They'll have to take comfort in the fact that as long as he's there, CBS news coverage will become more and more irrelevant.