It was a long swan song, and in the last months a strangely muted one, but at last it is over.
So now the motley parade leaves the city gates, and the long, convoluted trek of Dan Rather — complete with hopped-up peasants dancing around the trash fires of their own making and gleefully flinging stones at the departing procession — is finished.
We’ve watched all the benedictions, listened to all the cheap shots (Cronkite? Wallace?? Rooney???) and read all the pondits (Pon-dit: n. 1. Pontificating pundit) so that you don’t have to. There’s some smarmy stuff out there, but there are some insights worth remembering as well. For our money, no one summed up the squalid, bittersweet cross-currents of the entire affair better than two voices from the West Coast, Joan Walsh of Salon and Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Their words speak for themselves, so we’ll let them. First, Walsh, Salon‘s new editor:
[S]ome trend watchers will tell us it marks the end of one form of media — big media, corporate media, old media and, according to some, liberal media — and the emergence of a new one, ruled by a populist, disintermediated chorus of citizen journalists who live in something that’s been badly labeled “the blogosphere.”
That’s not, she notes, “the whole truth.”
Dan Rather is retiring because he’s 73. … He’s retiring a year earlier than he wanted to, but probably five years later than he should have. … The CBS anchor’s ratings have been shrinking — he’s long been No. 3 — and the networks’ news shows along with them. … [T]he numbers are still shocking: The average age of the big three’s viewership is 60. Only 8 or 9 percent of the crucial 18-34 demographic watches network news. This is media death.
So let’s be clear: Rathergate may have hastened Rather’s departure, but it didn’t cause it. Which is not to say it wasn’t a scandal. The story of how CBS ran with the Sept. 8 Bush report is an awful chapter in journalism and reveals terrible flaws in the news organization. I want to hand CBS’s investigative-panel report on the mess to every new hire at Salon; it should be taught at every journalism school.
After recounting CBS’s various shortcomings on the Bush Guard story, Walsh writes, “That’s what seems true about what CBS did wrong. Here’s what isn’t true:
“– That bloggers brought down Rather. Certainly the blogosphere hastened the fact-finding process, but there were so many holes in the Guard story that it would have unraveled on its own within days. … the early reporting of ABC News and the Washington Post was crucial to the final reckoning.
“– The other fiction is that ‘citizen journalists’ alone brought down Rather. In fact, the bloggers behind Rathergate — starting with Rathergate.com — were a mixed bag of independent citizens and scrappy document hounds alongside veteran right-wing activists with ties to all sorts of conservative causes,” from Morton Blackwell’s right-wing leadership training institute, to operations of conservative direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie.
She goes on:
I feel like a traitor to new media in admitting I’m a little alarmed by the glee in some corners of the blogosphere about the stumbles of the MSM, particularly CBS News and the New York Times. … While there might be a blogosphere without the Times and the rest of mainstream media, it’s safe to say it would be enormously less important and interesting. And the blogosphere alone is incapable of providing us with a full picture of the world, or of doing the sort of long-term, often unrewarding but occasionally world-changing investigative work that blogs just can’t support.
Maybe it sounds quaint or backward-looking, but at its best, the process of news gathering is expensive, it’s time consuming, and it’s a collective process, with reporters going off on hunches and editors reining them in and fact-checkers bringing skepticism, and in the end, some stories being killed or postponed, as CBS’s Guard segment certainly should have been. The blogosphere is unlikely to completely substitute for ambitious, muscular, well-funded news organizations going after the truth all over the globe day after day. And when some bloggers at a recent Harvard conference roasted [New York] Times managing editor Jill Abramson for pointing that out, they showed their own arrogance, which we know is fatal in truth-tellers … I’m rooting for the reform and reinvention and increasing relevance of the MSM; I’m not rooting for its demise.
… Given that the media itself — notably broadcast news and the newspaper industry — has become another lumbering institution, often sacrificing fearlessness to the bottom line, furious bloggers, beholden only to themselves, provide a needed jolt of adrenalin. … [but] what the mainstream media can still offer its audience is a commitment to some version of the truth and an organization and infrastructure that goes out and finds it. …
Just as time and timeless journalistic principles revealed the flaws in the CBS report, so too will they weed out the pretenders in the blogosphere. The truth always wins, eventually.
Walsh, of course, is correct. Truth will always out. In a free society, that’s one thing none of us can avoid.
As for Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle, he has his eye on the more sordid and seamy edges of the story, and he can’t seem to look away, like a man on a distant hill witnessing a once-quick but now-fatigued prey inexorably run to ground by baying hounds. But the man’s a writer, and yesterday he put it this way:
The fetid amusement of killing Dan Rather ends tonight. And what a tired affair it was. … Anybody who found joy in this deserves to rot in their own mean-spiritedness. Bravo, you threw stones at a 74-year-old careerist. You whispered sad stories about a weird man to a press corps all too willing to take him out. Dan Rather, who was by most accounts ambitious, polarizing, determined, a self-promoter, a tireless worker, a man who believed in his own ideals, a square peg in the proverbial round hole, the replacement for a myth, a flawed arbiter of history, a man less smooth than his peers and, lastly, a man complicit in a story that may have been inaccurate but not entirely wrong, is no longer the Dan Rather we knew.
He’s a statue dragged around the square. He will be the guy remembered for The Last Bad Thing, not his entire career, until we remember him that way no more, and move on to the decimation of someone else.
Killing someone in journalism is always uglier than a pop culture death because there’s this stench of self-righteousness from the press, and a chorus of anger and resentment from people who believe themselves to be political opposites of the corpse. From the tut-tut tone of Wolf Blitzer to the transparent hate of RatherBiased.com, the people … want blood, and they got it.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about Rather, which is interesting, because everyone also seems to have completely forgotten Tom Brokaw, who routinely killed Rather and “The CBS Evening News” in the ratings. …
So this is how it ends? We’ve turned Dan Rather, one third of the Iconic Anchor Trio, into Willy Loman. … [or] maybe Willy Loman is too old school. Maybe he’s the Jack Nicholson character in “About Schmidt.” Without his job he’ll be left to wander America in a Winnebago, a downsized “Gunga Dan,” a man totally cashiered by his own profession.
You can call that justice or karma or cruelty or fate. But there’s something sad about it. … In the end … everybody … is looking back in anger. But walking him out by his collar is not a parade to be proud of. This is a man’s life we’re talking about; gloating and glee are an indication of tiny minds.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.