Is Dan Rather going crazy, senile or paranoid?

Dan Rather is becoming a lot like your paranoid crazy old grandfather or uncle, who is always saying that everything in the past is better than it is now, and they way things are now essentially suck. Every family seems to have one of these in their closet.

“The former CBS News anchor said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen is four-decade career.”
Rather was asked if he felt the same repressive force in the Nixon Administration as in the current administration.

“No, I don’t” said Rather. That is not to say there weren’t forces trying to remove him from the White House beat while reporting on Watergate; but he felt supported by everyone above him. “(There) was a sense of, we’re in this together. It’s not that the then-leadership of CBS wasn’t interested in shareholder value and profits, but they also saw news as a public service.” Rather said he never knew about the pressure from the White House, because of his bosses support.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050920/tv_nm/television_rather_dc_1

To begin with, Dan Rather was never my favorite news broadcaster, and was always too controversial. He was always too willing to share his opinion, rather than just report the news. I have been impressed with Brian Williams recently, because he was asked his opinion on the way the federal government handled the Hurricane Katrina situation in the gulf coast, and he refused to comment saying he is a reporter, and therefore has no place stating his opinion. I can respect that. Walter Cronkite, Rather’s predecessor at CBS, was the most watched man for years and he very rarely gave an opinion and when he did, the whole country listened.

However, this article clearly shows that Dan Rather does not feel he has the support of his former superiors at CBS. This is a major problem if those that report the news are concerned that their superiors don’t have their back if things get tough. It is hard enough in industry to try to succeed if you don’t have your bosses support, but it has to be 100% more difficult when you are trying to uncover information, that others are trying to keep under lock and key, and knowing that your boss will fire or severely reprimand you if you take a wrong step. Where is the incentive for this investigative journalism if that is the reward?

He also acknowledges that the political operators are now more media savvy and know how to push back in all the right places. This was clearly demonstrated during the past presidential campaign when Rather was the first to break the story about the president’s military record (or lack thereof). What is interesting is that the republicans were able to squash the entire story, based upon a few missed placed and not fully fleshed out sources. Obviously, CBS News and Rather rushed the story to press in order to be the first to break it. The fundamental question about Bush’s military record was swept under the covers as Karl Rove and company spun this story as the liberal media trying to bury a republican president. The issue itself is still unresolved, and no one seems to care to find out what the president was doing for the last few months in the National Guard. Why is that? And more important, why does no one seem to care?

Rather also talks about the “dumbed- down, tarted-up coverage” of the national media. It is the job of the press to cover the government to ensure they are doing their jobs as representatives of the people of the United States and not violating the constitution. The first amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right for the free press to exist. Where is the person looking deeper into these issues and questions such as the president’s military career, or John Kerry’s military career, which was tarnished by the Swift Water campaign? The media seems to believe that an independent council, ala Kenneth Starr, is a better way to uncover government corruption rather than have to do the legwork themselves. This system only winds up costing the tax payers millions of dollars to usually conclude nothing.
He also refers to news media as no longer being a public service, but instead a form of entertainment. As a life long subscriber to Time Magazine, this point seems valid. Every few years Time will attempt to “update” the magazine format by making it more glossy, and removing some of the more thought provoking essay’s or more in depth articles and replace them with more entertainment, product reviews and human interest stories. I realize that selling magazine’s is a business and they need to cater to their audience, just as television news does, but why does it have to remove the intelligent articles and replace it with fluff?

So is Dan Rather going crazy, senile and becoming paranoid? Quite possibly!!! More importantly, we need to understand why the mainstream press does not seem to be doing their job, questioning people in power, digging deeper to find answers to questions that we the people may not want to hear. We cannot trust the government to always tell the truth, and I am ok with that regardless of the administrations political affiliations at the time. However, you need a strong press to balance the equation. The press needs to question and investigate and understand and explain the actions of their government to the people and why the government is doing what it is doing. Then the press must dig deeper if the answers are incomplete or deceitful or unacceptable to their audience for whatever reason. Sometimes the press will be right, sometimes wrong, sometimes something in between. You need a media outlet that is interested in the public service and not the ratings or the advertisers or whatever else might currently motivate them in order to achieve this balance of power between the government and those that report. Otherwise we wind up with a dictatorship or some other form of government controlled media, where it becomes impossible to determine what is true and what is not, and then we lose our freedom.