CBS Dan Rather may face some consequences after all because the CBS bigwigs are seemingly inching towards a neat, corporate-face saving (they hope) alternative to letting him resume a high-profile career after the independent panel’s blistering Memogate report: by canceling 60 Minutes Wednesday out from under him.
This would be a quintessentially corporate way of ending a ticklish problem. Because as long as Rather’s puss remains on the screen reporting on big stories, or set against the backdrop of exotic or tragic places around the world, one message will be transmitted to all: if you’re a star journalist and you screw up your career walks while others who screwed up with you find their careers cut off at the knees.
The catalyst for this speculation is a New York Times story which has the "nut graph" on top:
As much as he would like to recover from the blows his reputation has suffered recently, Dan Rather may not have a chance to work very long on the program that he expected would be his next professional address.
The future of CBS’s "60 Minutes Wednesday" – the program that broadcast Mr. Rather’s report, now discredited, about President Bush’s National Guard record – is in doubt, both the top CBS executive and the program’s new executive producer acknowledged yesterday.
And here’s how it’s being set up to happen:
Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS and co-president of the network’s parent company, Viacom, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Rather was expected to continue his career at CBS on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes" after he steps down as the network’s primary anchor in March. But Mr. Moonves added the phrase, "provided the show continues."
It gets worse one paragraph down:
The fate of the program that broadcast the report on Mr. Bush’s Guard record – relying on documents that an independent panel concluded had not been authenticated – is one of several unresolved issues at CBS News. Already, in the wake of the scandal, four top CBS News executives have lost their jobs.
One related question is whether Mr. Rather would move to a base on the original Sunday "60 Minutes" if the Wednesday edition is shut down.
We will say it here bluntly: fat chance.
Dan Rather now represents baggage to CBS. And we don’t say it out of any partisan bias whatsoever — but out of as journalistic bias, from the standpoint of someone who attended the Medill School of Journalism, where certain quality-control standards were taught. Rather and those that were fired didn’t live up to them. The key here is that the others were fired…and he continues in his glory on the tube. It’s hard to imagine CBS sticking him on the flagship Sunday edition of 60 Minutes: it would lower its credibility.
Meanwhile, CBS’ Memogate report can now be seen, in retrospect, as a major flop: it didn’t stabilize the controversy, but fed it, prolonged it, and raised new questions about whether star power trumps tough journalistic standards.
Even a Martian who left his room on Mars with Dennis Kucinich and Alan Keyes to visit Earth would look at the newspapers and ask: if the others were fired, why is Dan Rather continuing on 60 Minutes Wednesday…the same show where the report aired?
Where are his crystal clear consequences — aside from the fig-leaf-over-his-balls announcement that he was retiring from the CBS Evening News?
REQUIRED READING: Jeff Jarvis here on Dan Rather and the failure of the CBS independent panel report.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.