The legacy of Dan Rather

IT HAS NOT been a good year for Dan Rather. First there was the embarrassment of broadcasting falsified government records during a heated election season. Then Rather cost CBS News some hard-earned credibility when he admitted to having been hoodwinked by a Texas yahoo, but even that mistake might have been survived by America's longest-serving national news anchor. The real problem at CBS News is that its flagship broadcast has languished in third place for a decade. The "memogate" imbroglio only hastened the inevitable for Rather.

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Rather claimed in a statement that he and CBS began to discuss his retirement in earnest during the summer of 2004, "and we decided that the close of the election cycle would be an appropriate time." This would make it one of the best-kept secrets in the history of a business renowned for its leaks.

While the "close of the election cycle" does seem an appropriate time to change anchormen (last May, NBC's Tom Brokaw announced that his last day anchoring the nation's top newscast would be Dec. 1), March 9 is hardly in the realm of the "election cycle." Brokaw's final show airs a mere four weeks following the election, while Rather's goodbye broadcast will air five weeks after George Bush is inaugurated for his second term. Not exactly the "end of the election cycle," but 24 years to the day that he followed Walter Cronkite on to the set of the "CBS Evening News."

Rather is not by any means solely responsible for either the "memogate" fiasco or the ratings decline of the "CBS Evening News." CBS News is a large organization, and others made editorial decisions, produced newscasts. He helped create the final products. But Rather is unmistakably the public face of CBS News. He not only fronted the ill-fated "60 Minutes" scoop, but he (like all anchormen) spent his career conflating his personal identity with his organization's output.

Even before Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias," a best-selling expose of CBS News (in which he called Rather "the Dan" and portrayed the anchor as both Machiavellian and mentally ill), it was well known that anchors -- who usually also retain the title of managing editor -- have inordinate power in both the newsrooms and the executive suites.

Rather's 23 years at the helm of the "CBS Evening News" should be considered a period of transition at best, a steady decline at worst. While it is unfair to blame Rather for not being Walter Cronkite, he should be compared with his contemporaries, Brokaw and Peter Jennings. While all three anchored programs with stronger and weaker periods immediately following the Cronkite era, the 1990s have been dominated -- in both ratings and relevance -- by "World News Tonight" on ABC and "Nightly News" on NBC.

While airing phony documents is inexcusable, the real question concerning Rather's departure is how he managed to retain his job in light of the steady ratings decline of the "CBS Evening News." Surely CBS management knew that Rather's quirky personality was a liability. His proclivity for unpredictable behavior led him to walk off the set one evening in September 1987, and in the mid-1980s he mysteriously -- and briefly -- signed off his newscast with the word "courage." In 1993, when his ratings were a third of Cronkite's 1981 numbers, he teamed up with Connie Chung in a desperate attempt to remain competitive. That experiment proved a failure; CBS News continued to trail both ABC and NBC in both ratings and relevance. The other two networks would go on to own the O.J. Simpson story and the Clinton impeachment in ways CBS News could only envy.

Since Rather took over the anchor chair, television news has been transformed. Today the producers of the "CBS Evening News" face competitive pressures that were unforeseeable in the golden age of network television. Ratings were important in 1981 -- do not let nostalgic news executives convince you otherwise -- but they did not dictate news content and editorial decision-making. Although cable news existed in 1981, CNN was still the "Chicken Noodle Network" -- marked by low production values and staffed with inexperienced youngsters trying to play with the big boys. The Internet was still primarily a military application, and local news lacked the technological capability to compete with the national networks.

Recently a local news anchor in Cleveland packaged a sweeps-week report on her nude modeling experience; unlike Rather, Walter Cronkite never had to compete in the freak-show, circus-like atmosphere that is contemporary broadcast journalism. Perhaps Rather should be grateful for the opportunity to leave before it gets worse.

Michael Socolow is director of the journalism program at Brandeis University.