Dan Rather is now a senior, retired network anchor.
Otherwise, you’d have to say “Not a good career move!” when you read this:
Former CBS news anchor Dan Rather escalated a feud with his former employer Tuesday, saying CBS Corp. (CBS) (CBS) Chief Executive Leslie Moonves “doesn’t know about news.”
Moonves had said earlier Rather’s remarks that the network was “tarting” up its newscast with Katie Couric, Rather’s successor, were “sexist.”
The spat started Monday when Rather, speaking by phone on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program with Joe Scarborough, said CBS had made the mistake of taking the evening news broadcast and “dumbing it down, tarting it up,” and playing up topics such as celebrities over war coverage.
While referring to Couric as a “nice person,” Rather said “the mistake was to try to bring the ‘Today’ show ethos to the ‘Evening News,’ and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience.”
Rather’s big problem: those who remember the Dan Rather takeover of the CBS Evening News and the many stories about how Walter Cronkite was basically rushed to the door and into retirement to accommodate Rather (he was barely-used by CBS during the Dan Rather era) know that Rather himself took CBS newscasts down a few notches by the way he reported some news stories.
He’d use colorful, folksy phrases that suggested he perhaps felt his audience had an IQ a bit lower than the audience to which Cronkite was broadcasting. It also felt as if he was straining to be quotable.
Cronkite was avuncular and enjoyed widespread popularity and credibility. Rather was more of a flashy globe-trotting CBS correspondent. Once Rather inherited the anchor chair from the hastily retired Cronkite, no one could ever confuse him with carrying on Uncle Walter’s style, which was heavily influenced by Cronkite’s years as a wire reporter and working for Edward R. Murrow. Cronkite was a tireless worker who by one account had the nickname “Old Ironpants.”
It was less about Cronkite as anchor than Cronkite presenting the news; with Rather, it seemed more about Rather reporting the news and, perhaps, reacting to it.
Ironically, the man who most carried on the more pristine Cronkite style was Bob Schieffer, who replaced Rather. The grey-haired Schieffer, the quintessential, loyal and underused CBS company man, surprised many by helping boost the ratings. When he took over for Rather some critics predicted that an old fogey like him could never build viewership. But he did. MORE:
Moonves, speaking at an event in New York Tuesday morning sponsored by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, called the remarks “sexist” and said he was surprised at the amount of negative coverage Couric was receiving.
“She’s been on the air for nine months,” Moonves said. “Let’s give her a break.”
Moonves is somewhat off base as well.
Nine months is not the equivalent of one second in broadcasting.
TV sitcoms have been yanked off the air in less time for failing to attract an audience. The bottom line is that Couric’s talents have been poorly-used and packaged by CBS. She has, in fact, conducted excellent hard news interviews during her career and that includes on “Today.” Instead, there was endless hype about the beginning of a new generational era, with a woman heading a newcast, bringing in new viewers etc, etc.
Which read really nice.
Except that the river of viewers flowing to the show didn’t happen.
Couric started strong but has settled into a distant third in the evening news ratings race. Last month her “CBS Evening News” set a record for its least-watched broadcast for at least two decades, then broke it the very next week.
Later Tuesday, Rather said during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” program that he didn’t regret making his earlier remarks, but insisted he was referring to CBS’s management of the newscast, not to Couric personally.
“It doesn’t have to do with Katie, it doesn’t have to do with gender,” Rather said. “It has to do with the corporate leadership. … Les Moonves knows about entertainment, but he doesn’t know about news.”
So here you have it, two media bigwigs doing damage control. Rather did not leave CBS as a journalistic role model that young journalism school students wish to emulate. He didn’t end his career as a negative role model, but he was not a smash success in the ratings or among critics (and certainly not among conservatives and conservative bloggers who made him a “high concept” symbol of all they claimed was wrong with a media that apparently is righted in their eyes by those fair-and-balanced folks at Fox News who never show THEIR biases..).
And Moonves miscalculated, too — taking a proven ratings winner with high likeability and hard-news interviewing talent and misusing her.
Actually, Couric’s stint at CBS News so far is reminiscent of the great David Letterman’s ill-fated stint as Oscar host.
The lesson in both: you need to work within THE FORM that has worked and THEN, if you’re successful, change the form.
You don’t just come in and do your thing and forget the form that has been successful and accepted by viewers.
PS: The Oscars should give Letterman another chance. And viewers should give Couric another sampling now that CBS is tinkering with the newscast.
And Rather? He needs to be more realistic about his role in lowering the seriousness of news reporting in some of the phrases he used on Election Night. “Courage” was only the high-profile, cringe-generating phrase. Rather didn’t deserve a lot of the ridicule and rage heaped on him. But he also contributed to the demise of the Cronkite tone of news-anchoring.
And that’s the way it is.
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.