I'd Rather...But Not Dan Rather

Well Folks, its official. Dan Rather announced yesterday that he is stepping down next March as the anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News. CBS executives are trying to tell us that good old Danno’s retirement is unrelated to the “Memogate” scandal regarding President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service during Vietnam, but I beg to differ. The results of the “independent investigation” into the “alleged” forged documents forming the core of the story are yet to be made public, and the producer of the segment, Mary Mapes, is still lurking around behind the scenes at CBS.

Rather’s retirement is simply an obvious effort at damage control—they still want Dan’s sullen scowl on the Sunday and Wednesday “60 Minutes” segments. Stay tuned for more high quality, partisan BS—we’re counting on you Dan.

What we are witnessing today is the culmination of yet another evolution in the way information—specifically news—is disseminated in our society, and it is a GOOD THING. Other forms of media have endured this type of evolution and survived—TV News will too, but not without major changes in the names involved and the motives behind the decision making process. On behalf of the Internet Bloggers I’d like to say that “We have only begun to fight…”

Take the written media, specifically newspapers, for example. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the NY Journal, and Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the NY World amassed fortunes running their ”Yellow Journalism” empires in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, and yet competition in the newspaper industry served to ultimately balance out their egos and the fiction dispensed as news by these two media giants. We need another dose of reality for newspapers like the NY Times today, and I assure you that the Internet is looming on their horizon as well.

For Hearst and Pulitzer, there was an incident similar to “Rathergate” at the beginning of the Spanish American war. Following the explosion of the Battleship US Maine in the harbor in Havana Cuba in 1898, both the Journal and the World published a so-called “suppressed” cable message that purported that the death of the 260 crew members was not an accident. The public furor resulting from the story based on the false cable served as a major incentive for President McKinley to declare war with Spain. So much for the idea that a fake document cannot influence history in a substantial way if its veracity is allowed to go unchallenged.

Almost one hundred years later, we have seen the rise and fall of yet another form of journalism--the network news broadcast. We just don’t buy what they report as news anymore. People have too many sources of news to buy a single viewpoint, and the cable news shows and more importantly, the internet, will go down in history as the reason for the change.

I am proud to be, in a small way, a part of this revolution. The fact that you just read this posting to my blog indicates your desire for another point of view. I hope you will keep reading in the future.