Why is Dan Rather stepping down?
Since Rather announced he would be retiring next March after 24 years at the head of CBS’s evening newscast, the primary motivation ascribed to him by a scandal-happy press is that alert bloggers drove him to it by disputing the provenance of documents Rather had offered up on CBS’s “60 Minutes II” purporting to show that President Bush got favorable treatment during his National Guard service more than 30 years ago. Attendant in those criticisms is the presumption that Rather and colleagues recklessly approached the story with intention aforethought to unseat a sitting president. Repeated accusations of such intent, along with Rather’s own peelback, amounted to a reputational death by a thousand cuts.
Yesterday, however, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times made a convincing case that something else entirely drove Rather’s departure: the imperative of the bottom line at Viacom, the vast conglomerate that owns CBS.
Rutten reminds us that CBS’s nightly newscast has run last in ratings among the big three networks for all too many years. Further, on election night, a beleaguered CBS cemented its place in the basement by drawing an audience of voters smaller that drawn by NBC, ABC, CNN and Fox News, and barely nudging past humble MSNBC for fifth place in a six-horse race.
Rutten concludes, “Rather is not losing his job over scandal or Internet calumny. As the essayist and social critic Joseph Epstein wrote this week, at most, ‘by catching him out in shoddy journalistic practice, [the bloggers] cost Dan Rather an honorable departure from a long career.'” But, “[t]hat career ended because, at the end of the day, nobody was watching.”
–Bryan Keefer
