Nonsense. Don’t tell me you haven’t had fantasies about either Laurie Dhue or Lauren Green. Or both together! […drool…]
No.
i had no problem with him. I’m not an overly critical person. I didn’t have a favorite among the big 3, and would scan among them depending on what was being covered. He was fine.
I did enjoy him a lot during the election coverage. His phrases were hilarious. He added a lot of enjoyment then. ie) “It don’t mean a thing, if you ain’t got the Swinnnnng states.”, and other things like that.
Well I will admit to loving his election night coverage _ I would not miss it for the freaking’ world. I will miss it very much. Why? Ratherisms
This was a time when he was likely to pop out with something like “We used to say if a frog had side pockets, he’d carry a handgun.” He was unintentionally so very weird that it was like watching your weird Uncle at THanksgiving while everyone just sort of ignores his idiosyncrasies. Watch him shoot out a “This race is tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach” turn to Bob Schaeffer and ask a serious political question and watch Schaeffer act as if Rather had just said the most reasonable thing in the world. If you believe election night coverage is basically the same news in different packages, each breaking the same results within minutes (essentially) Then Rather was really the only game in town where some genuine nutniness/fun stuff might have been injected IMO
Bottomlineline (esp. with the election coverage) It was always the same news. It was all about delivery, packaging and presentation. With him I always felt, as he might say
“Frankly we don’t know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon.”
Will I misss him? You bet.
I like Dan. He is a genuine and respected journalist. He’s been the whipping boy of the right ever since Nixon asked him at a press conference “Are you running for something?” and Rather shot back “No sir, are you?” Now he’s the whipping boy because of the memo story. Instead of focusing on the contents of the memo, which are indisputably true, the focus was on the fonts and the authenticity could not be proven (of course, it was not proven to be fake). But he paid his dues working his way up the ladder, unlike the hacks at FOX who check their credibility in the dressing room.
Dan Rather is perfectly acceptable to the 95% of the American viewing public who aren’t mouth-foaming right-wing nutjobs. 
Former print journalist here. I always preferred Dan Rather’s newscasts over the other networks, because as others have said here, he had the best credentials as a news reporter. Before he replaced Cronkite, he had seventeen years as a network news reporter, much longer than Brokaw or Jennings.
Yeah, but wasn’t that sort of the problem/ He had (past tense) those credentials and sort of lost it…
Brokaw had a pretty decent resume prior to taking the anchor desk. I watched that great special on him last night. I’ve always been a Brokaw fan and will miss him quite a bit.
I can never forgive Brokaw for that “Greatest Generation” Bilge
I grew up on Huntley and Brinkley, with an occasional side order of Cronkite. None of the current guys have ever done anything for me after that.
That being said, I could never stand Rather’s calculated folksy-isms. Contrived and painful, IMO.
I don’t watch much TV news, but even I can come up with quite a few memorable moments involving Rather over the past few decades. Him getting blown around by that hurricane, traveling to Afganistan during the war there (with the Soviets, not the recent one), interviewing Saddam, the current memo scandal, confronting Bush I about the Iran contra, his hilarious election reporting, the aforementioned confrontation with Nixon. In High School, they played a bunch of old news footage from Vietnam, and there was a young Dan Rather reporting live from the war zone.
Maybe it’s just me, but I really can’t do the same thing with Brokaw or Jennings. Despite having higher ratings, neither of them has been a presence in the same way Rather has.
I spent quite a few hours in front of Dan Rather. I don’t mean he was on the t.v. and I was sitting there in my boxers eating peanut butter with a tablespoon, either.
I stood 5 feet from the man and walked as he talked, I with my Steadicam strapped on and he with his steady gaze reading my TelePrompter. Over and over and over again. As a cameraman hired to shoot the wrap-around segments for “48 Hours”, I did indeed spend dozens and dozens of hours with Mr. Rather.
I know a thing or two about reporters. My Dad was one for over 20 years. Listening to HOW Mr. Rather worked with the scripts and the questions he asked earned a lot of respect from me.
I had quite a few conversations with Mr. Rather, as we would stand there out at the end of a hallway, or inside a blazing room ( fire training center location ), or inside a prison hallway next to ancient cells. His sense of respect and decorum are not a put-up. This gentleman is the real deal. Articulate, intelligent in the extreme, quick-witted, genteel but not a patsy. The details of the conversations are both private and irrelevant, what carried across consistently was a genuine humanity.
I don’t just like him. I enjoyed interacting with him, and admire his tenacity. His journalistic chops are beyond question. As for the poster who made a deal about how he USED to be a journalist, I would offer this: you never ever lose those chops. That outlook, the newshound zeal, attention to details. He’s a Reporter, not a Chair Anchor.
Having spent time with him, nobody can convince me that he’s a figurehead. He’s the real deal.
Cartooniverse
** somewhere is a photo of myself with Mr. Rather. If I can find it and scan it in, I will link it through from a website. Best Cite I can provide to prove I am not lying.
“Liked”? Not greatly. But I thought Dan Rather got a raw deal from my fellow conservatives, who regarded him as a man of the Far Left, which he plainly wasn’t. I think Dan was generally a slightly left-of-center Democrat, but it wasn’t blatantly obvious in his broadcasts.
Walter Cronkite was a biased liberal. Dan Rather generally wasn’t. But I think conservatives made Rather pay for Cronkite’s sins.
It annoyed me whe he said “as we say back home…”
I live in Southeast Texas. We do NOT say many of those things back home.