September 13, 2004

Forgery Update: Dan's Cronkite Complex

James Gattuso over at the Technology Liberation Front blog has some interesting comments about those CBS forged memos.

Its no surprise that CBS would defend its story and its reporting. But Rather went far beyond that - expressing a kind of outrage that he even would be questioned. Look at the way he described his critics on the CBS Evening News Friday, referring to them dismissively as "[s]ome on the Internet and elsewhere, some people, including many who are partisan political operatives…" This sounds like a man who expects to be trusted implicitly - and does not like to be doubted.

In other words, he wants to be Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite held an almost mystic position in the American media world —a kindly man almost universally trusted. The man who symbolically held the nation’s hand after the Kennedy assasination, and who was almost as much a part of the Apollo program as Neil Armstrong himself. Not that he necessarily deserved this god-like status. But in the 1960s there wasn’t much room for dissent. TV news was limited to NBC, ABC, and Cronkite’s CBS. There were newspapers and magazines, of course, but relatively few troublemakers who could contest the network mandarins. Thus, what Cronkite said was Established Truth.

Poor Dan Rather expected to ascend to this status when he took over from Cronkite. But he never quite got it. Part of the problem is that Dan just isn’t Walter. Rather than reassuring, Rather comes off as, well, rather eccentric.

But more importantly, the news world changed dramatically about the same time Rather claimed the Anchorship. First cable news appeared - and Rather had to share the spotlight with not two, but dozens of other anchors. Of all types and sizes, ranging from Aaron Brown to Bill O’Reilly to Paula Zahn Tony Snow. Then came talk radio. Then the Internet. Not only respectable websites, but sites by troublemakers like Matt Drudge who love to poke holes in stories, or report those that had been missed by others. Now comes the blogs - armies of amateur commentators who, like Lilliputians swarm over every detail in the news, second-guessing the establishment media Gullivers, and giving their own spins.

Like a distraught heir to the Bourbon monarchy viewing the French Revolution, Rather is doubtless shocked by this media revolution - having not only failed to gain the respect and admiration he feels he deserved, but losing it to - to - the Internet! People that don’t even have an FCC license, for gosh sakes.