Dan Rather, Fake Newsman

[Buzzsaw Checkerling]

As they say in Texas: all hat, no cattle.

by Kyle Smith
April 28, 2017
nationalreview.com

It’s fitting that Dan Rather is best known for bringing to the world a
piece of fake news about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service in
Texas, because that’s where he began his career in shoddy journalism.
The bungling goes all the way back to 1963 Dallas. His presence there
on the day President Kennedy was assassinated helped create the legend
of Dan, but he actually blew the story that made his name.

Rather had heard from a priest that the president was dead, but knew
that wasn’t a strong enough source to back up such a huge story, so he
didn’t pass along the tip to his superiors while he tried to shore up
the rumor. According to Alan Weisman’s biography Lone Star: The
Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather, Rather became confused
about who he was talking to on the phone. Thinking he was speaking to a
fellow reporter on the ground, Eddie Barker, who was elsewhere in
Dallas, he was actually on the line with the CBS News control room in
New York: “Did you say, ‘dead’? Are you sure, Dan?” said the voice in
New York. “Right, dead,” Rather said, still thinking he was talking to
Barker. So, to Rather’s horror, CBS radio blasted the news out to the
world. “Rather said he began shouting into the phone that he had not
authorized any such bulletin,” Weisman wrote. “Accurately or not,
Rather was credited with being the first to report the death of the
president.”

Dan Rather was never much of a journalist. What he excelled at was
playing one on TV. His latest performance has the hacks thrilled: In
recent days he’s gotten the People magazine treatment from People, and
again from Politico, which heralded, two weeks after Easter, “Dan
Rather’s Second Coming.” So Rather is much like Jesus Christ, except
instead of being crucified for our sins he was crucified for his own,
albeit with said crucifixion amounting to being separated from his
position as the Ron Burgundy of CBS and forced to seek refuge in
low-rated cable. Behold, he is risen . . . on something called “The Big
Interview” on AXS TV, which is one step up from Wayne’s World on
public-access TV. Dan’s next episode features a chat with Sheryl Crow.
Recent guests include Billy Gibbons (of ZZ Top), Crystal Gayle, and Kid
Rock.

If Rather is barely a working broadcaster anymore, Rather’s fans at
Peoplitico cite his popularity on Facebook, where he has 2 million
Likes. His feed News and Guts has over a million of its own. His
personal posts are the usual leftist porridge of overreaction, anger,
and hysteria about President Trump: “This is an emergency . . . it is
gut check time,” Rather wrote on February 24, referring to (remember
when this was a thing?) “the barring of respected journalistic outfits
from the White House.” (Politico itself now acknowledges that the
alleged conflict with the media is a “fake war.”) After Wall Street
Journal editor Gerard Baker calmly explained that he was reluctant to
label a misstatement by Trump or anyone else a “lie” if he couldn’t
show intent to deceive, Daily Kos and other field reps for the
perpetually agitated Left thrilled to Rather’s angry Facebook response,
“A lie is a lie is a lie.” He ought to know.

The appeal to younger progs seems to work like this: Donald Trump’s
presidency is so outrageous that even staid, studiously neutral
octogenarian anchorman Dan Rather agrees with us and is publicly losing
his spit. It’s cathartic and awesome to witness so much venom spewing
out of such a geezer. Rather is the journalistic Bernie Sanders, just
as Sanders is the political Larry David. Watching cranky old men go
nuts is fun.

This is nothing really new for Rather. Entertaining his audience has
always come first and if (as in Dallas) he sometimes mangled a story so
badly that he would have been fired if he had been working on a
small-market city desk, he always kept his newsman face on. “Rather
would go with an item even if he didn’t have it completely nailed
down,” wrote Timothy Crouse in his chronicle of campaign reporters, The
Boys on the Bus. “If a rumor sounded solid to him . . . he would let it
rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew
exactly why he got away with it: Being as handsome as a cowboy, Rather
was a star at CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed.”
Rather’s big Watergate moment, typically, was simply about Rather: At a
press conference, the president asked him, “Are you running for
something?” and Rather cheekily if nonsensically replied, “No, Sir, Mr.
President, are you?” We’ve grown so used to showboating news blowhards
making themselves the center of attention that it’s easy to forget
where it began. In Rather’s era, other TV newsmen strove to be
self-effacing and bloodless — John Chancellors and Roger Mudds.

Did Rather ever break any news? Sure. He reported, in 1969, that
President Nixon was about to fire J. Edgar Hoover. Except Nixon never
did fire Hoover, who was still FBI director at his death in 1972.
Rather also bungled a story that Nixon was about to fire a top Vietnam
official. “Dan had an overwhelming drive and ambition, and at times his
ambition overcame his journalistic caution,” Rather’s longtime CBS
colleague Bob Pierpoint told Weisman, adding, “He had a more dramatic
persona than the others.” (Pierpoint praised Rather’s “mannerism and
his delivery.”)

The “dramatic persona” gradually grew ridiculous, as during the 1980 60
Minutes segment that Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales memorably
dubbed “Gunga Dan.” Rather, dressed ludicrously in mujahideen-wear,
breathlessly told the cameras that he was disregarding his own safety
and sneaking into Afghanistan for a segment Shales called “punchy,
crunchy, highly dramatic, and essentially uninformative. . . . We knew
something about the war against the invading Soviet troops before 60
Minutes, but, and this is important, did we know how the war was
affecting Dan Rather?” Shales noted that Rather is seen nervously
asking about distant bombing. His interpreter replies, “Nothing to
bother us. Don’t worry.” Shales concluded, “It’s hard to decide whether
[Edward] Murrow is smiling down approvingly or spinning in his grave.”

Rather’s ‘dramatic persona’ gradually grew ridiculous.
There was always a fine line between Gunga Dan and Diva Dan. When
Rather stormed off the CBS Evening News set in a hissy fit in 1987
because he learned that U.S. Open tennis coverage was going to bleed
into the news and cost him precious face time, the network was forced
into the unprecedented situation of going black for six minutes. Even
being fired by CBS after the 2004 debacle in which Rather’s team, in
collusion with John Kerry’s campaign, aired unverified documents about
George W. Bush’s National Guard service that were almost certainly
fake, didn’t teach Rather anything: He still stands by the story.

Vamping for the Politico photo shoot, Rather brought out a costume and
props: He wears a trenchcoat and carries a reporter’s notebook, as
though he’s ready to pump Kid Rock for sources. The picture brings to
mind the 2005 New Yorker profile by Ken Auletta, in which a pathetic
Rather, desperate to prove he’s something more than a performer reading
scripts, is seen lunging for phones and asking about meetings that took
place as usual without him. He’s a daffy, irrelevant figure who, when
an outsider came to profile him, “pretended to be more involved in
shaping the daily broadcast — barking orders, assigning stories,
writing copy — than he actually was.” That’s Dan Rather: fake newsman.

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"On February 17, 2017, the United States Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt
as the 14th Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."