Opinion: This just in -- Dan Rather rails against journalists, including self!
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive festival yesterday, the former CBS anchor warned that journalism is in a ‘very perilous state.’ Excerpt:
‘I do not exclude myself from this criticism... By and large, so many journalists -- there are notable exceptions -- have adopted the go-along-to-get-along (attitude),’ he said. [...] ‘We’ve brought it on ourselves,’ he added, ‘partly because we’ve lost the sense that [the] patriotic journalist will be on his or her feet asking the tough questions. My role as a member of the press is to be sometimes a check and balance on power.’
What bold, refreshing candor! Until you realize Rather’s been giving this same rubber-chicken speech since long before Al Gore invented the World Wide Web. For evidence, more after the jump.
Remember that great Broadcast News movie from 20 years ago? Where Holly Hunter plays the idealist tough-gal news producer who bores people with shrill speeches about how journalism has lost its way, while brainless pretty-boy anchor William Hurt charms his way to the bank? Well, combine the two, make them much less attractive, and you’ve got Dan Rather and his crocodile-tears act (one performance of which I witnessed in L.A. several years ago). ‘I think we have diluted and diminished our brand name,’ he lamented to the Washington Post‘s Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, in their dreadful 2002 book The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril. Or there’s this speech from 1997:
In our worst moments, of which there have been far too many, we have all succumbed to sensationalism and triviality, to one degree or another. About that, we should all be ashamed.
Or this one from the early Grunge era:
In too many important ways, we have allowed this great instrument, this resource, this weapon for good, to be squandered and cheapened. About this, the best among us hang their heads in embarrassment, even shame. We all should be ashamed of what we have and have not done, measured against what we could do—ashamed of many of the things we have allowed our craft, our profession, our life’s work to become. Our reputations have been reduced, our credibility cracked, justifiably. This has happened because too often for too long we have answered to the worst not the best within ourselves and within our audience. We are less because of this, our audience is less, and so is our country.
Why, you’d almost think that Rather was in a position to do something about this some time over the last four decades!