NYP: DAN RATHER'S WELL-EARNED FEAR - The MSM has no one to blame but themselves.

In a speech Monday at Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, Dan Rather claimed there was a "new journalism order": politicians applying pressure to news conglomerates, "dumbed-down, tarted-up" news coverage, 24-hour cable competition and a "chase for rating and demographics" — all of which creates an "atmosphere of fear" in newsrooms greater than anything he has seen in his four-decade career.

What kind of fear? Certainly not the fear of broadcasting "inaccurate" stories, such as Rather's own bogus report on the president's National Guard service. Not the fear of journalistic bias as in the mainstream media's attempt to blame the president for absolutely everything that went wrong with the regard to the Katrina disaster.

And certainly not the fear of unbalanced coverage, such as the virtual blackout of positive news regarding the War on Terror.

The "fear" in newsrooms is all about the undoing of unbridled arrogance that comes with a loss of power. It is about the competition of ideas engendered by a raft of new media challenging the near-monopoly status quo formerly enjoyed by network news "icons" such as Rather himself.

It is about an American public that now knows that the slogan "the most trusted man in America," once used to describe Walter Cronkite, no longer applies to any member of the mainstream media.

Dan Blather Update

Filed under: Journaljism
LC Fresh Sign linked this dung heap of Rather droppings.

Emotional Rather blasts ‘new journalism order’

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) – Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.

Mmm…. A “climate of fear”. It’s pretty bad when the news people make cheesy entertainers seem serious. Compare:

And here in Washington, Helen Thomas finds herself banished to the back of the room and uncalled on after asking Ari Fleischer whether our showing prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay on television violated the Geneva Convention.

A chill wind is blowing in this nation. A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown. If you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications.

Every day, the air waves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the public, like so many relatives and friends that I saw this weekend, sit in mute opposition and fear. – Tim Robbins, blithering idiot

Unlike Dan’s words, Robbin’s speech had power – raw power, emotional power, enough power to make Tim Robbins more famous for his paranoid lunacy than he ever was for acting.

But this:

Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians “of every persuasion” had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a “new journalism order.”

Sniffle. He was “forcing back tears”. How my poor heart breaks for the power mad multi-millionaire who ran the news like his personal fiefdom.

He said this pressure—along with the “dumbed-down, tarted-up” coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics—has taken its toll on the news business. “All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms,” Rather said.

Is it this fear, this “chill wind”, that leads newsmen to pimp laughably forged documents off as “authentic”, or is it blatant bias combined with unforgivable stupidity?

Rather was accompanied by HBO Documentary and Family president Sheila Nevins, both of whom were due to receive lifetime achievement awards at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards on Monday evening.

I find it quite telling that Rather is getting his award right alongside the “Family Programming” president that produced such family gems as A Real Sex Xtra: Pornucopia – Going Down in the Valley” and Cathouse 2: Back in the Saddle.

Nevins said that even in the documentary world, there’s a certain kind of intimidation brought to bear these days, particularly from the religious right.

Well of course. After catching an episode of Nevins’ Taxicab Confessions, how can a little old church lady get around, hiring Morgan Freeman?

“If you made a movie about (evolutionary biologist Charles) Darwin now, it would be revolutionary,” Nevins said. “If we did a documentary on Darwin, I’d get a thousand hate e-mails.”

A noted producer is worried about a thousand nasty grams in a country of almost three-hundred million people? Maybe hate mail is the reason she makes Pornucopia instead of science documentaries, or maybe it’s ratings, money, and laziness. Take a look at her productions and see if you see something worthy of a lifetime achievement award – or just a pile of cheap pulp.

Nevin asked Rather if he felt the same type of repressive forces in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush administration.

Amongst moonbats, this is termed “a softball question”. I’m surprised Gunga Dan didn’t swing for the fence with, “No, the current administration reminds me more of the Hitler administration.”

“No, I do not,” Rather said. That’s not to say there weren’t forces trying to remove him from the White House beat while reporting on Watergate; but Rather said he felt supported by everyone above him, from Washington bureau chief Bill Small to then-news president Dick Salant and CBS chief William S. Paley.

“There was a connection between the leadership and the led . . . a sense of, ‘we’re in this together,”’ Rather said. It’s not that the then-leadership of CBS wasn’t interested in shareholder value and profits, Rather said, but they also saw news as a public service. Rather said he knew very little of the intense pressure to remove him in the early 1970s because of his bosses’ support.

Dan just flat out knew very little of the early 1970s. Then he lost touch completely.

Nevins took up the cause for Rather, who was emotional several times during the event.

Oh, there I go wetting my cheeks again. I don’t know whether to cry more for Dan or for Tim Robbins, the oppressed thespian.

“When a man is close to tears discussing his work and his lip quivers, he deserves bosses who punch back. I feel I would punch back for Dan,” Nevins said.

You go girl. Punch. Back. for. Dan. And get rolling on “Pornucopia II” while we await a “PunchBackforDan” T-shirt to replace our “Free Mumia” wardrobe.

Rather praised the coverage of Hurricane Katrina by the new generation of TV journalists and acknowledged that he would have liked to have reported from the Gulf Coast. “Covering hurricanes is something I know something about,” he said.

“It’s been one of television news’ finest moments,” Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

What??? Everybody sitting in front of a set watching Katrina got fed up with the screaming, hysterical, weeping, uninformed, rumor mongering that passed for journalism. Even Victor Davis Hanson threw one of his well-penned bricks at the TV, saying

For all the media’s efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into either a racist nightmare, a death knell for one or the other political parties or an indictment of American culture at large, it was none of that at all. What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated journalists, worried not about truth but about preempting their rivals with an ever more hysterical story, all in a fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the environment and the war.

Let ghoulish CNN file suit against the government to film all the bloated corpses it can find. Let a pontificating PBS “NewsHour” conduct more televised roundtables with grim-faced elites searching out purported national racism. But few any longer trust a frenzied media whose reporters and commentators continually prove as incompetent as they are disingenuous.

That’ll bust a set.

“They were willing to speak truth to power,” Rather said of the coverage.

Speak that TRUTH Dan, and go forge us some documents about Bush’s cover-up of those 25,000 missing bodies.

Rather sidestepped the question of what should happen to the evening news in the expected makeover. “Not my call,” he said. And he said he hadn’t been asked, either.

He barely managed to keep the door from hitting his ass on the way out, too.

“I gave it everything I had, I didn’t hold anything back. I did the best newscast we were capable of doing,” Rather said.

Sadly, that might be the largest truth he’s spoken.

Nevins, who almost single-handedly has kept the art of the independent documentary on television, said the HBO documentaries show real life and do it with as little damage to the subjects as possible. She said the producers and directors “respect mostly the people on the other side of the camera.”

I’m sure they do, if “wow – awesome tits” is one of their highest tokens of respect.

Nevins said she didn’t shy away from such R-rated topics as “G-String Divas” and “Taxicab Confessions” but noted that sex and passion have been topics of literature since Chaucer’s day. “The most R-rated is a body bag, not a naked body,” Nevins said.

Yet there’s CNN, suing to put body bags on prime time TV. Nevins delved into this topic a bit deeper in an interview is Ms. Magazine.

” I have a respect for people telling their own stories. Holocaust survivors, cancer survivors, sex workers, pimps — they all wrestle with the same things. They want to survive the onslaughts. They have to make a living. They want to be excited and stimulated by life. I think that surviving in this complex, tossed-about universe is courageous, and how people do that is of great interest to me.”

Breathtaking, no? “Holocaust survivors, cancer survivors, sex workers, pimps — they all wrestle with the same things.”

Oh really? Aside from the order to “take off your clothes”, exactly what did the Holocaust have in common with working in a topless bar?

She’s getting a lifetime “achievement” award, ladies and gentlemen – under-achievement, but I guess that’s an achievement nonetheless.

Posted by Sir George Turner, http://nicedoggie.net/2005/index.php/?p=898

Additional Comments on Dan Rather, the CBS Petard Hoister:

A career of lies, from "Hate in Dallas" to Memogate. The epitaphs I could think of for him.

Posted by: Jay at September 20, 2005 07:00 AM

Ah yes . . . it's really easy to make "documentaries" and "mocumentaries" when you don't have to worry about anyone else having a large enough platform to dispute your assertions. Poor Dan.

Posted by: left brain female at September 20, 2005 07:15 AM

But there's nothing really new about this. Commentators and journalists have always received complaints about their work. P.G. Wodehouse, writing in the 1950s, wrote about the effect of political correctness on humorists.

The only thing that's really changed is the speed at which feedback appears.

Posted by: PhantomObserver at September 20, 2005 10:21 AM

Rather and other entrenched media types do subscribe to Hillary Clinton's "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" theory, and really don't believe bloggers have enough initiative to find out things like Burkett's fake documents on their own. Since they consider bloggers to be incapable of digging out information without being part of a major news organization, they must either be getting "help" from partisan sources -- on the right, of course -- or they may actually be members of those right-wing groups who are merely posing as regular people posting to their own weblogs.

With that mindset, it's no surprise that Dan would see sinister forces at work against him, since only trained professionals like those at CBS News cann ferret out the facts and speak truth to power.

Posted by: John at September 20, 2005 10:40 AM

Poor old Dan Rather is still suffering from the trauma of having his career wrecked by legions of pyjama-clad, fact-checking bloggers.

That's right, Mr. Rather. The Internet has allowed anyone to instantly research and fact check anything. No longer can reporters and news anchors always get away with promoting political or social agendas without regards to the truth.

Freedom of the press belongs to those who have one - and we all have one now, Danny boy.

Posted by: at September 20, 2005 11:33 AM

-- http://angrygwn.mu.nu/archives/121631.php

...I absolutely love the idea of a "climate of fear running through newsrooms!" Know why? Because what they're afraid of losing is their customers and that's a good fear for any business to have.

It's an especially good fear for newsrooms to have because many journalists, like Dan Rather, have believed throughout their careers that they could be completely indifferent to what the customer wanted and for a long time, because they essentially had a "gentleman's monopoly" going, they got away with it.

Twenty years ago, if you didn't like the liberal bias of CBS and didn't trust them to be straight about the news, there wasn't much you could do about it. Sure, you could turn the channel to ABC or NBC and get the same slant on the same news or open up your local paper and read essentially the same thing in print, but consumers had no real options, no real alternative views.

Today you have Fox, talk radio, and the internet giving the public a different perspective on the news. They cover stories that the MSM ignores, point out "inconvenient facts" the MSM buries, and are fair to people the MSM treats with contempt.

Take the hurricane Katrina coverage Rather thinks was one of the MSM's "finest moments." Many people believe that in actuality, that was the mainstream at its worst, at its most partisan. It wasn't "speaking the truth to power," it was an attempt by liberals to blatantly exploit a natural disaster to stick it to the hated Bush administration.

20 years ago, very few people in the media would have said that and even if they did, no one would have ever heard it because the left so completely dominated the media. Today, it's being said in every medium across the board and hundreds of millions of Americans are hearing it.

Those Americans, after getting both sides of the issue, can now choose between a wide array of media sources. Maybe that means Dan Rather and some of his old media buddies are going to have to live in what they think of as a "climate of fear," but their "fear" is good news for the American public.

John Hawkins, http://rightwingnews.com/

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