Posted on 09/19/2005 8:36:17 PM PDT by aculeus
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.
Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent.
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."
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Nevin asked Rather if he felt the same type of repressive forces in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush 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.
Nevins took up the cause for Rather, who was emotional several times during the event.
"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.
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.
"They were willing to speak truth to power," Rather said of the coverage.
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.
"I gave it everything I had, I didn't hold anything back. I did the best newscast we were capable of doing," Rather said.
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."
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.
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."
Gee Dano, YOU could have said NI to the neweweltansordnungjournalismi, but you were in there
goose stepping with the rest of them!
If there were justice in the world, you'd be drug out of
your comfy studio and hung from a lamp post for perpetrating
a fraud on the American People for THIRTY YEARS!!!
Just brings tears to your eyes, doesn't it?
What a crock. Dan's fantasies are too much. CBS was the American liberal version of Pravda, a propaganda ministry right out of a George Orwell novel. Liberals destroyed the news media long before the wet lipstick fashion model newsreaders came along.
"Rather blasts 'new journalism order'"
Once again proving where he stands on the "adapt or die" aspect of the workplace.
That's pretty sad. A child in middle school could have explained to Rather how biased the cBS Evening News was.
Sign up for the National Guard - even for a specialty which requires a substantial commitment to active duty for training and makes you the tip of the NG spear - and cynics will say that if you didn't get killed in Viet Nam you are a draft dodger and not qualified to use the military in accordance with the Constitution. Decide to allow that training to lapse after historical changes have reduced the call for people with that training, and cynics will second guess that.But be cynical about American culture and values, urge people to refuse military service, and oppose funding the American military for thirty years, and you will be the cynic's choice for president.
The new journalism order is far better than the old journalism disorder.
If you want to know why I'm what you call a cynic you have only to look at your defensive rationalizations.
Your ostensible agnosticism on the subject cannot survive a fair reading of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents
5.56mm
I've been slowly working through the Newcomer article you linked. It's slow because I'm neither an expert in the history of digital typography nor a bright 12 year old who's fluent in word (the only two groups Newcomer thought would find his article to be child's play).
Whether I'm beating a dead horse depeneds on whether you still can't make up your mind about whether the documents are fake. So, you tell me. The Wikipedia article, which cites Newcomer, is easier to absorb than Newcomer in the original Greek, if that's any help.
Why is my position so difficult to accept?
At the time I didn't know about the opinions of a consensus and I found it impossible to follow the technical discussion. One guy said a typewriter could do what another said it couldn't. One expert claimed a near perfect match for the documents and Word generated modern copies. Another said the similarities were only superficial and disappeared upon examination under magnification. A third said it was impossible to decide because, after so many generations of copying, too much noise had been introduced. And so on.
By the way, I believe it's true that a consensus of experts supports the idea that modern global warming is caused by human activity...and that Intelligent design is about as scientific as necromancy.
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