On Dan Rather's Departure from CBS

You know, I'm actually going to miss Dan Rather. He was a far better personality and had far more integrety than 90% of the current day news personalities. It almost seems like an end of an era, I should be happy that bottom-up media is having an impact, but I don't want it to kill old media, merely shake it up and make it better. I guess you can't have a shake up though without a few heads rolling, but there will always be room for broadcast news, newspapers, and radio just as there has always been room for books and ukulelias.

"Of course, the guy has always been a little bit out there. There was his decision to sign off his newscast with the word 'Courage' for no apparent reason three times during a single week in 1985 as well as the bizarre 1986 incident in which Rather was roughed up by attackers who reportedly asked, 'Kenneth, what is the frequency?' -- a line later immortalized in an R.E.M. tune.

It also didn't take much to prompt certain peculiarities to exit Rather's lips, such as during my interview with him last year.

CBS Evening News with Dan Rather 1989 (RealMedia, 33seconds, 1.81 Mb)

Describing his love of CBS and CBS News, Rather observed in the interview last year: 'In my mind and the minds of the people I work with, this is a magical, mystical kingdom -- our version of Camelot. And we feel we are working at a kind of roundtable of King Arthur proportions. Now, it may be that this kingdom exists only in our minds. But that makes it no less real for those of us who live it every day.'

And then there was this: 'Ed Murrow's ghost is here. I've seen him and talked to him on the third floor of this building many times late at night. And I can tell you that he's watching over us.'

If Rather has been spending too much time of late yakking with the ghost of Murrow and too little confirming the veracity of his sources, maybe we need to cut the dude a little slack. He's earned the right to be eccentric by continuing the quest to be a real journalist when he didn't have to."

Article: Humble Rather earned departure fit for an icon

Video Clip: CBS Evening News with Dan Rather 1989 (RealMedia, 33seconds, 1.81 Mb)

Video from: InformativosTV