And yet. Dan Rather was one of the great breaking-news reporters of our time. Hurricanes, earthquakes, big sudden stuff--he loved it, and he knew how to cover it. A friend reminded me of the beauty with which Dan asked for silence as CBS's cameras lingered on the sun going down on quake-ravaged San Francisco in 1989. And I think of his delicate coverage of stories like Princess Diana's funeral
I think that 1989/90 was the critical time when Dan Rather's head exceeded his hat size. He started believing too much of his own press, and started seeing himself as the story.
I remember watching Dan Rather covering the Oklahoma City bombing. He interviewed the man on the scene responsible for the search and rescue operations, I think it was the Fire Chief, though maybe he was Police. After wasting the man's time with obvious questions for five minutes, Dan Rather had filled his airtime and was ready to hand off. Before he let the Chief go, he asked him, on air, to remain available in case he, Dan Rather, needed him again later.
It was a stunning visual example of where Dan Rather though he fitted into a story. Of all the people at that scene, Dan Rather considered himself to be the most important, and felt that everyone, even the Commander at the scene, should make themselves available if he needed them.
Rather reported from a open-air desk set with his back to a collapsed California two-stack freeway, waiting for them to pull the crushed and mangled bodies out.This is what I wrote on the other thread about that "reporting". It was sick. Not "peak" -- it was "the pits".He was obviously very distressed. Why? Because, thank G-d, there were only a couple or so. Not the dozens and hundreds he had pumped and stroked his followers for.
Day after day, hour after hour, he sat there selling soap and cars packaged in a promise of human blood and guts to come.