Posted on 03/14/2005 10:47:28 AM PST by nickcarraway
There they were, on C-Span 2, for 50 minutes Sunday Evening. Former CBS News Correspondent Tom Fenton interviewed about his book, Bad News. And the interviewer? A man whose truly bad news was inextricably tied to an event of the past week: the retirement of CBS Evening News Anchor, Dan Rather.
He is Roger Mudd. Twenty-four years ago, Mudd was a CBS News Correspondent considered the heir-apparent to then-reigning Walter Cronkite as the man in the anchor chair. It didn't happen. There was this brash Texan, who had made a name for himself as President Nixon'sbete noir while the network's White House Correspondent. It was known that Cronkite was soon to retire, on his own terms, and it was widely assumed, in and out of the organization, that the dignified Mudd would succeed him.
One day, six months before Cronkite was ready, top brass at CBS had an announcement: Cronkite's replacement would be -- Dan Rather -- and almost immediately. Cronkite would be mollified with a seat on the CBS board of directors, a rumored million dollars a year, a cubby hole with staff at the headquarters building, Black Rock, and several handshakes. Mudd swiftly left CBS's employ, went to NBC, and finally was narrating for the History Channel and doing interviews such as that of Fenton on C-Span Sunday evening.
What happened? Rather's agents had lined him up with ABC News and told the CBS brass it was now or never; fork over the Cronkite job or we move Rather to ABC (cue sound of cheap suitcase collapsing). As the late ABC News chief Roone Arledge wrote in Roone: A Memoir, "What startled me most though, in scrambling to get Rather, CBS had pressured Cronkite into stepping aside six months in advance of his scheduled retirement." That apparently startled Arledge more than the threat of an ABC job as a lever.
This Black Rock coup, then, may explain some of Cronkite's current enthusiasm for Rather's successor, Bob Schieffer, in the anchor chair, and a concomitant disdain by Mr. C for Rather's third place ratings all these years. Mr. Cronkite has taken to wondering aloud why Rather was retained all these years.
But for fifty minutes Sunday evening, Roger Mudd queried the just-retired Tom Fenton about the burden of his book: that the major networks had abdicated their responsibility by abandoning foreign bureaus and leaving much of the world, especially the Muslim world, a desert of reportage. Fenton recounts his desire to interview a fellow named Osama bin Laden in 1996, to be turned down by CBS in New York because it would cost money to leave London.
The quiet, dignified Mudd was occasionally fonted "former CBS News Correspondent" during the interview as well as former NBC fellow. Through it all, no mention of the past so well known by both men. In fact, in all the print regarding Rather, his memo authenticating problems, and his departure after 24 years, there has been no exposition of the beginnings. How he got the Cronkite chair remains a largely unwritten chapter in the history of CBS News.
Mudd has never said or written ONE word about what happened..
So this is an article about two guys who didn't talk about what the article purports to be about?
Another piece of the Dan Rather puzzle . . .
Bias is most often accomplished by what you don't say, and what you refuse to report.
The recent studies posted on FR that examine the "negative coverage" of Bush during the 2004 campaign are finding bias for Kerry and against Bush -- but somewhat muted bias. Nothing really startling, In reality, the refusal to cover many of Bush's successes is the biggest bias of all -- but impossible to uncover in a Lexis/Nexis search.
Roger Mudd was the best of the bunch.
He was smart and fair -- a career-torpedoing combo at CBS.
if CBS wanted to hire someone that might make a difference they should steal Dean Reynolds at ABC.
When it got to the Dan Rather fiasco (which was at its height then), they all 3 agreed that Bush had somehow dodged the draft. However, soon the topic turned to Rather himself and this Mudd-Rather episode way back when. They all were unamimous that it should have been Roger Mudd who succeeded Cronkite.
I was surprised...it was the first I had heard of the Mudd-Rather episode. I wonder if a lot of the media news' spiral into garbage dates from this event.
His voice was out there - the nicest thing you could say is that he was a bit less obvious a leftist than Rather....but way left none-the-less.
In retrospect, each was about as far far left as the other - Cronkite was just smart enough not to get caught in any dirty tricks.
I could care less about CBS and their anchors.
Roger Mudd would have been great compared to the partisan liberal from Texas. I remember Ted's lack of a coherent response to Mudd's 1979 question.
The only thing I remember about the Ted-ster at the time was Caroll O'Connor (another CBS guy) plugging him in a TV ad, probably '79 maybe early '80.
I recall when Ted was on the stump in Iowa and he asked a group of farmers some like, "How's the service on the so and so railroad," indicating he would do something about it when he became president. Trouble was, someone had given Ted a map of Iowa from the 1920s and the railroad he mentioned hadn't served Iowa for 50 years...
"Her publisher, Random House, will not release the book to reporters or critics in advance,
and Ms. Fonda will not give interviews
before her appearance on "60 Minutes,"
scheduled for April 3."
Hanoi Jane's imminent autobiography
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1360385/posts
60 Minutes ALERT!
Anybody think Dan Rather will do the interview?
Rather, 73, is returning to full-time reporting for CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcasts.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7137959/?GT1=6305
Sort of like all the wronged women and the Clintons.
I remember that interview well. Mudd, who had been close to RFK, was persona non grata with the Kennedy family after that interview aired.
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