RATHER KNOT

This time, CBS really broke the news

by NANCY FRANKLIN

A discussion about the value, relevance, and long-term viability of network news shows has been going on for a while, and naturally it accelerated in the past couple of weeks, after CBS’s unsinkable “60 Minutes” plowed into an iceberg. The sorry episode, in which the authenticity of documents used to buttress a story about the President’s National Guard service three decades ago was called into question, enjoyed only a brief life as a flap—when it looked as though CBS had the goods to back its story and the attacks were anti-big-media gun spray from the trigger-happy right—before becoming a scandal when, last week, it came to light that CBS could not authenticate the documents after all. When Tom Brokaw announced, in 2002, that he would retire after this year’s Presidential election, the Internet heated up on the subject “Whither the network news?” With cable news rocking around the clock, and with the Internet providing instant news—or corrections of the news—often faster than even cable could broadcast it, was there a place anymore for a late-in-the-day, twenty-two-minute news show? This time, the Internet—blogs in particular, many of which are part-time enterprises, written and compiled by guys sitting at home waiting to pounce on the mainstream (excuse me, élite) media—played a more important and more active role in the story, by immediately questioning the validity of the memos that Dan Rather, the correspondent of the “60 Minutes” piece, used to support the well-established claim that Bush received preferential treatment during his now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t service in the Texas Air National Guard.

CBS, in its rush to air the story, which was reported in large part by the producer, Mary Mapes, and overseen by Andrew Heyward, the head of the CBS News division, failed in its basic journalistic duties, and then took its time apologizing. Shortly after the “60 Minutes” broadcast, when conservative bloggers went into “C.S.I.” mode and raised doubts about the memos, CBS and Rather dug in their heels, even as the ground was crumbling under them, and put out a bizarrely defensive statement saying, “Contrary to some rumors, no internal investigation is underway at CBS News nor is one planned.” By then, the questions about those at CBS who were responsible for the broadcast—what didn’t they know, and when didn’t they know it?—called for full and honest answers. To twist one of Rather’s favorite Texasisms, that dog should have hunted. Finally, twelve days after the story aired, CBS and Rather apologized for not having sufficiently investigated the provenance of the documents. The next day, it was reported that Mapes had put in a call to Joe Lockhart, a Kerry campaign adviser (and a former press secretary of President Clinton’s), asking him to call Bill Burkett, a retired Texas National Guard lieutenant colonel and Democratic activist who had provided the documents in the first place, and who wanted to get in touch with the campaign. Ouch.

At this point, the discussion of the episode became less a referendum on the viability of network news and more a dissection of CBS News specifically and of the chain of approval for its stories. CBS News and Rather are often accused of “liberal bias” (there is, of course, a Web site, ratherbiased.com, devoted to Rather’s sins), and Mapes’s gigantic errors in judgment—and, more seriously, those of Heyward—won’t help the network’s case. Needless to say, CBS also took a spanking at the hands of the late-night talk shows, including one of its own: David Letterman ran a fake intro to the CBS Evening News, with an announcer saying, “Tonight on the CBS Evening News, we report nine real stories and one fake one. Can you guess which is which?”

Still, Rather’s mistake probably had more to do with competitiveness and scoopaholism than with any political bias. That’s the way people in the news business are made. One of Rather’s famous bits of behavior involved his walking away from the anchor’s chair, in 1987, to protest the intrusion of a U.S. Open tennis match into the evening-news slot, a huff that resulted in six minutes of blackness going out over the airwaves. Rather wanted the network, if it was going to stick with the tennis, to start the news at seven, at the beginning of the next half-hour interval; but when the match ended only two minutes after six-thirty, efforts had to be made to find Rather and get him back in his seat. In an interview for Ken Auletta’s book “Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way,” Howard Stringer, who was the president of CBS News at the time of Rather’s walkout, said that “the difference between a reporter and an anchor is like the difference between a D.A. and a judge,” and that this was an instance of Rather, whom he called “an outstanding, aggressive reporter,” being the D.A. (It could also be viewed as a case of Rather acting as though he himself were the law.) Rather was defending the primacy of the news, with the intensity and the hardheadedness that he has become known for.

Aggressiveness and determination are necessary attributes in reporters, obviously, and any high-profile figure in network news needs them in double supply, partly so that he can do his job and partly so that he can be seen to be doing his job by his bosses—careful, unshowy reporting may earn plaudits from other journalists, but it is invisible to both the networks themselves, which are primarily concerned with the business of entertainment, and the corporations that own the networks (ditto). Memorable evidence of this was provided in 2002 by Disney-owned ABC, when it pulled the Mickey Mouse move of trying to replace Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” with Letterman. The networks have a laserlike focus on the bottom line, and the money that they spend on their news divisions has decreased over the years, as have the ratings for all three network newscasts; they still have more viewers by far than the cable news shows, but those numbers are going down, and CBS has been in third place for about a decade. Although the Iraq war, global terrorism, and the Presidential campaign have juiced those who work in network news, it isn’t a rewarding time to be an anchor. (Except financially, that is—all three anchors are doing quite well, thank you.) Rather, Brokaw, and Peter Jennings are tops in their field; they go to the best parties and know everybody who’s anybody; and they know a lot about the world. Still, they have to wake up every day and prove that they are not—to use the word that invariably crops up when the traditional network-news format is batted around—dinosaurs. Polls and ratings figures show that young people are not developing the warm, fuzzy feelings toward anchors that their elders supposedly have, and the networks have no idea whether what loyalty does exist will carry into the coming years once all three of the current anchors are gone. At the moment, CBS needs Rather. He is the face of the network, and if his face were suddenly to be absent—if his face were fired, that is—the CBS eye would look like a black hole, and you’d hear the wind whistling through the void. And then you’d turn the channel.

The networks have been active agents of their own diminishment: all of them cut foreign coverage way back in the decade or so before September 11, 2001, and this year, with the country at war and with the first Presidential campaign following a historic and disputed Presidential election, they chose to carry only one hour of the Democratic and Republican Conventions each night. Even if the network news shows still see themselves as a kind of public trust, the public is increasingly looking elsewhere for a credible and ordered reflection of the world; the authority that used to belong to the networks is now scattered across the multimedia universe. Rather was enlisted to appear on Letterman’s first show after September 11th, as a reassuring presence, but it was Letterman’s soulful monologue that provided sense and solace that night. (A transcript of the monologue is available on—where else?—a blog.) We’ve all become empowered by the choices at our fingertips, but we—bloggers, TV viewers—don’t necessarily have the skill and depth of experience that news organizations draw upon. Speed isn’t everything—as Rather himself painfully found out. But the fact that a respected newsman has proved to be a flawed captain of his ship doesn’t mean that anyone else would be any better at steering the thing.