Dan Rather and the Cult of the Anchor

Okay, this will be my last post on Dan Rather for now -- if only because I'm going on vacation for a week and leaving Mixed Media in the extremely capable hands of guest blogger Sean Elder.

The general reaction to Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against CBS has been "Why on earth would he want to dredge all this up when it can only further tarnish his reputation?", but there are some dissenters. Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar, a lawyer by training, thinks Rather has some decent claims on the breach-of-contract front (assuming a judge agrees with his interpretation of what "regular" appearances constitutes).

But there's legal and then there's fair, and, any way you slice it, what happened to Rather was fair. Even if you take him at his word -- and there are plenty of people contradicting his version of what went down -- you're still left with a guy who allowed his name and face to be used on a dubious report that caused great damage to his employer's good name.

If all this were taking place in England, there would be no issue. Anchors there are called "newsreaders," and no one assumes they do any more than that. They don't put on khakis and dodge mortars in war zones or lash themselves to telephone poles to cover hurricanes.

No one has done more to encourage the cult of the reporter-anchor than Dan Rather. Remember that New Yorker profile in which he made a big show of answering his own phone, or those 21 cups of coffee he boasted of drinking to get himself through election night in 2000?

Rather had what he wanted for 24 years: He was the face of CBS News. But being the face of something has a downside; you can't disassociate yourself when trouble hits. What's not in dispute is one of two things happened: Either Rather rushed out with a story that wasn't seaworthy, or he failed to demand editorial control of a of piece that he knew would have his name on it. Either way, the mistake was his and no one else's.