Angry in the Great White North

From Breitbart via Drudge:

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 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.

"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.

I find this segment very telling.

Though I believe in the theory of evolution, it is interesting to note how Nevins laments the fact that someone would get a thousand hate e-mails for doing a documentary of Darwin. First, I suspect it depends on the tone -- a documentary that mocks or belittles people who don't believe in evolution should expect to be on the receiving end of some criticism. But putting that aside, Nevins seems to be saying that it is harder to do your job as a documentary producer educating the public when the public keeps, well, talking back.

It was so much easier when there were no emails and the person doing the documentary could focus on just talking at a silent public.

Dan Rather makes a similar point. News was seen as a public service, and in those days "he knew very little of the intense pressure". Pressure from the government or from the public?

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."

Of course Dan Rather is emotional. He lost his job and his legacy because of the new journalism order.

But even now Rather has difficulty telling the truth.

It helps his ego to believe that he was destroyed by the full power of the government. But no politicians compelled CBS to spike the Killian memo story. Unfortunate for Rather, I suppose. Nor did the government respond much at all after the bogus story aired. The pressure applied came from below, not from above. Bloggers, who live in an environment of constant feedback and criticism, directed that feedback and criticism at Rather and CBS. They were the ones who forced the main stream media to face questions about the obvious problems with the evidence backing the story. They were the ones who demanded CBS and Rather address those deficiencies or retract the story. Today, there was nothing his bosses could do to shield him from that.

How could they shield him? That pressure was coming from the public to which Rather says he was providing a service. Clearly they've gotten uppity since the 1970s. No wonder he's crying.

Like Nevins, Rather is frustrated that in this new environment, people can have their opinions heard almost as widely as the pros like Nevins and Rather.

Not surprisingly, Rather yearns for the good old days, just as Nevins does, when he could just do his job, telling people what he decided they needed to know, without all that bothersome public feedback. But at least Nevins is being honest about it.