THE DISHMASTER

Jumping out of an airplane, but not bungee jumping, starring in a Broadway musical and going out with George Clooney, if that can be arranged?” Katie Couric’s response when asked for her bucket list at an ABC press event.

Written By: Rik Sault

At age 80, Dan Rather may be trying to embody one of his many memorable quotes: “You can’t be a good reporter and not regularly be involved in some kind of controversy.”

Rather unceremoniously parted ways with CBS after an infamous 60 Minutes segment about George W. Bush going AWOL during his Vietnam-era stint as an Air National Guardsman. The September 2004 story was based on photocopies of memos criticizing young Bush’s performance, but the documents were widely debunked as fake. CBS commissioned an independent investigation of the debacle and Rather, among others, was faulted for failing to properly vet the documents. Rather left CBS in 2006, after 43 years with the network.

At first, Rather apologized for the incident, saying that CBS news could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the documents. But he eventually changed course, indicating that CBS was too quick to fold and proclaiming, “Nobody has ever proven that the documents were not what they purported to be.” On September 19, 2007, Rather sued CBS for $70 million, alleging breach of contract and fraud, but one of New York State’s Appellate Divisions dismissed the case in 2009.

Now, Rather is on tour promoting his new book, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News. A large part of the book deals with his departure from CBS and his ongoing tirade against what he perceives as the corporatization and trivialization of American journalism. In the book he says that CBS chief Leslie Moonves has a “spine of Jell-O.” In Rather’s opinion, while Moonves is a great asset to the entertainment division at CBS, he has undermined the strong history of CBS news. He also describes Katie Couric, who anchored the CBS Evening News from 2006 to 2011, as “News Lite.” On a prior occasion, he opined that it was a mistake to try to bring the “Today show ethos” to the CBS Evening News, and to “dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience.”

When Dan Kurtz recently asked Rather to appear on his CNN show Reliable Sources, Kurtz received no response. Kurtz talked about Rather on his show anyway, and he asked the question that many of us our wondering, “Why is Dan Rather still pushing and defending this story, this discredited story?”

Some sources says he has spent more than $5 million on his crusade. As a sage friend of mine pointed out, if he would have just dropped it, people would have long forgotten about the Air National Guard incident. So why won’t Dan Rather take my friend’s advice and just drop it?

Could it be that he is simply carrying a chip on his shoulder after his fall from grace? Or maybe he was forced to endure years of corporate and political limitations on his journalistic freedom while working for CBS, and after he left his post he is now free to cry out.

Whether he is a zealous champion of real American journalism or a stubborn, 80-year-old Texan (or both!), his actions do seem to ensure that he will not soon be forgotten. While his ratings towards the end of his CBS career lagged behind those of NBC’s Tom Brokaw and ABC’s Peter Jennings, his dogged tenacity and borderline liberal conspiracy theories may ensure that his Wikipedia entry is more oft-viewed than either of them.

Before I start this post, I’d like to express my strong dislike for Sarah Palin. Having said that, I’m about to defend her. News outlets everywhere are still citing Katie Couric’s infamous question about Sarah Palin’s reading choices as a hard journalistic revelation. Allow me to put this to bed. When Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin what newspapers she reads and Palin refused to answer, everyone assumed that Palin simply didn’t read. But here’s the snag: if I’m being interviewed, and the “journalist” asks me what newspapers I read, I might tell such “journalist” to take a flying leap (or something laced with more profanity, which I’ll refrain from printing, because it’s not lady-like). The question itself implies negative judgment, and a real journalist wouldn’t ask it (such as Barbara Walters, for example). I’m fully confident Palin dodged that question because she was offended, and not because she’s never heard of the New York Times. Even a monkey knows about the New York Times. And before my readers attack me, please read the first sentence of this post again.

If there’s a public interest in losing your job, you might as well cash in on it, right? When Barbara Walters asked Katie Couric if she was leaving CBS during her appearance on The View, Couric squirmed. At the time, I knew why. She didn’t want to give The View a huge amount of press with nothing in return. Why not make some money on your job loss? Couric chose People Magazine for her big announcement, and I imagine they paid her a pretty penny for the revelation. If there truly wasn’t bad blood between Couric and CBS, she might have gladly given CBS the free publicity.

I’ve certainly noted my objection to the sexy Glee photo-shoot for GQ Magazine, but must Katie Couric discuss this on her CBS newscast? Isn’t she supposed to be reporting “real news?” I wasn’t aware that hard-hitting news had now become about Glee actresses posing in their underwear. I wonder if Dan Rather saw the video below, and wept.