Bye, bye, Dan
: Dan Rather is stepping down from his pedestal in March. Yes, bloggers deserve some credit….
The dinosaur of news just keeled over. This marks the end not of any golden age but of pompous, stand-apart news. They don’t know it yet, but it does.
(I was blogging this from a TV news greenroom, where I was doing something unrelated. That, by the way, was how this entry and the one below got messed up; my Treo ate them. Anyway, there was much buzz among the TV news folks, but little surprise.)
Howard Kurtz appeared on CNN and said that Rather left now — before the release of the Rathergate report — so he could leave on his own terms. That is to say, the report is not going to be a valentine.
I wish CBS would have the balls to try something new, to break out of the pack, to blow up the obvious, to reinvent what TV news should be. They won’t, of course. But we can try to tell them how they should do it. What would you do with CBS news if you had to fill that chair? Leave comments.
: Here’s RatherBiased.com’s statement.
Frankly, it’s a shame that it has to end this way for Dan. In the end, he became the person he most despised, Richard Nixon. Had Rather and the CBS management been more serious about viewer input and fairness, they would never have had to stonewall about a story they shouldn’t have run.
And Powerlineblog’s here.
What should happen but won’t I
: They should recognize what’s happening in news and hire Jon Stewart or David Letterman or anyone with attitude — not haughty Rather attitude, but the attitude of the audience, the voice and scowl of the people, the honest voice of the comedian who pokes holes in pomposity rather than pumping it up. It should happen but won’t.
: Jay Rosen on Rather’s farewell.
