James P. Pinkerton
September 21, 2004
These are the final days for Dan Rather. But the story of the fake documents aired on "60 Minutes" is deeper than just one man's fall. It is the story of technology's transition-and that's a tale that will never end.
By any fair reckoning, Rather should resign. As a big shot at CBS News-in addition to being anchorman-in-chief, he has been the managing editor of the CBS Evening News since March 1981-he deserves to be held to the same standard as Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times, who was forced to resign last year in the wake of a news-fabrication scandal.
Some might argue that Rather was just a duped news reader, that he was simply following orders. In which case, following the precedent established in the 1998 "Tailwind" scandal-in which CNN's Peter Arnett was forced to quit after he read phony copy about Americans using poison gas in Laos-Rather should still be forced to take his leave.
But even if he limps along at CBS till the expiration of his contract in 2006, Rather is done for. He will be remembered as a reporter-crusader who went chasing after the Big Story both courageously and recklessly. Whatever the subject - hurricanes, Watergate, Afghanistan, George W. Bush - he was always on a quest. And like Captain Ahab, the obsessive anti-hero of Moby-******, Rather had many successes, but then he went harpooning after one too many a whale.
But if whaling provided drama in the 19th century, the big events of that era were elsewhere. The major purpose of whaling was to bring home lubricants and fuel. But whales as the source were soon displaced by petroleum; the modern industrial economy was born.
And so today, when Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, speaks of "the end of the era of network news," his reference is far more broad than just one man, or one scandal. He is speaking of the rise of cable news; Fox, actually beat out the broadcast networks during the Republican convention earlier this month.
In fact, cable of all kinds has been eating away at the traditional oligopoly of VHF channels 2-13 for a couple decades now. Whereas once the few UHF channels were a hard-to-reach province of snowy re-runs, today hundreds of cable channels are as clear and reachable as anything on broadcast.
So the "de-massification" of the media has been ongoing-and will keep going. In the '90s, Internet-based news-most notably the Drudge Report, which burst on the scene in 1998 by breaking the Monica Lewinsky story-proved that the "new media" could blow past older media. And now we have even newer media: the bloggers, the folks at home in their pajamas who collectively broke the "Rathergate" story.
The two key concepts in this never-ending techno-saga are the increasing ubiquity of Internet-based technology and the decreasing barriers to entry into a public forum. That is, anybody with a computer and a modem can be a blogger, and any blogger can be a media-player.
So what comes next? The past tells us that techno-change is tectonic change. Prior to the 15th century, the Catholic Church maintained its monopoly in part by controlling Bible production. Bibles were not only scarce but were hand-scribed in Latin, which only priests could read.
Then came Johannes Gutenberg, who used movable type to mass-print Bibles, eventually in local languages. Soon ordinary folk were reading the Bible for themselves and thinking for themselves. Protestantism was born. What followed was a century of religious war, but the world was transformed. One of those transformations was the radical new reality that technology would continue shaping events.
So today, Rathergate is just so much foam on the surface. The deep current of our time is that the old networks have lost their power to a bunch of scruffy no-names. Techno-change is shaping history yet again.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
