Dan Rather, Ready For His HD Close-Up

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 9, 2006

NEW YORK -- Dan Rather says he no longer dwells on his tumultuous 44-year career at CBS News. Well, almost never.

"Obviously there are moments when I look in the rearview mirror," he admits.

But in a barren temporary office on Park Avenue, he is eager to talk about the new program he is building, piece by piece. "I have found it liberating, and more so than I thought it would be," Rather says of his venture for the high-definition channel HDNet, which debuts Nov. 14. His new boss, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, "has given me in writing total, complete, absolute journalistic control. This is unprecedented in my experience."

During the quarter-century that he anchored the "CBS Evening News," Rather had a small army of producers, reporters, researchers and assistants tending to his every need. His new staff numbers 16, including freelancers, and he has to supervise such mundane matters as finding office space and installing phones. In fact, he is struggling to master this newfangled device called a BlackBerry.

"One should not underestimate -- I probably did underestimate -- the chaos factor," Rather says.

Rather knows what his legions of critics are saying -- that he was driven out of CBS because of his badly botched report on President Bush's National Guard service, and is now trying to redeem himself by resurrecting his journalistic career.

"I understand how some people may view it that way. I don't," Rather says. Instead, the 74-year-old warhorse says, he simply wants to be a reporter "as long as God gives me my health. And even if my health deteriorates, I want to do news."

Wayne Nelson, a CBS veteran who is executive producer of the new show, puts it this way: "I don't want to see his legacy be the last story he had on television. He has brought so much to this industry, to be remembered that way would be really unfortunate. I think he's got several good laps left."

Rather says he remains "puzzled" why CBS had no interest in having him continue at "60 Minutes," where he landed after yielding the anchor chair. "To stay at a place -- even as storied a place as CBS News -- and not be able to do work, or very much work, was not something I'm interested in," he says.

Rather has christened his new company News and Guts, which more or less captures his self-image. He says that the weekly "Dan Rather Reports" will have a hard edge and that he is trying to land interviews with major newsmakers. "We're hunting big game," he says.

The focus of these hour-long shows, he says, will be largely on three areas: veterans, politics and -- "I hate the phrase 'middle class' -- regular Americans who are neither in poverty nor well-off. People struggling to make it, meet the house payments, make their car notes."

Already, Rather has been to Latin America to examine what he calls "narco-states" and interviewed soldiers at Fort Hood, Tex., who have fought in Iraq. A story on state medical associations failing to police doctors is in the works. There may also be an election night special before the show debuts.

Rather's friends see him as reenergized after a troubled period. "It's nice to see him take that straitjacket off from the anchor desk and go out and report," Nelson says. "He's like a kid again. He's beating the bushes like a cub reporter."

Still, HDNet, which reaches 3 million homes through satellite and cable, is hardly a mass-market vehicle. "We're dealing with a small audience, a very small audience," Rather says. "I have no illusions about that. But it's a quality audience." The problem with huge media companies, says the man who spent his career working for one, is that "they have legislative and regulatory needs in Washington. They have the imperative of increasing stockholder value. What we've learned in the last 25 to 35 years is that this creates all kinds of potential pressures and influences on what news consumers get."

With his new venture, says Rather, "there's no ratings pressure at all, none, zero. No demographic pressure, zero. Where else in television -- or, for that matter, radio or print -- can you say that? This is light-years away."

And what does he think of the newly revamped "CBS Evening News With Katie Couric"? Rather begs off, saying he's been traveling and has caught only part of one newscast.

Numbers Game

Many NBC staffers were in a celebratory mood last week. After a summer of intense publicity surrounding Katie Couric's move to CBS, Tuesday's "NBC Nightly News" outdrew the "CBS Evening News" by almost 2 million viewers. For the first four days of last week, Brian Williams's newscast averaged 8.8 million viewers, compared with 8.1 million for ABC's Charlie Gibson and 7.1 million for Couric, her second straight week in third place.

It was a long climb back for perennial leader NBC after Couric won her first two weeks in September.

"It was inevitable that there was going to be some sampling, and logical that more sampling would come from us because Katie came from NBC," says "Nightly News" Executive Producer John Reiss. "Now people are coming back and frankly we're very happy about it."

But CBS executives see the race differently. Compared with the same week a year ago, they say, their new anchor is looking good -- up 8 percent, compared to slight declines at the other broadcasts.

"Nobody here expected us to launch and be No. 1 immediately and stay there for months at a time," says CBS News President Sean McManus. "As long as we continue to be up, I'm satisfied we're making progress."

In the key 25-54 age group, CBS is up 19 percent from a year ago, but still in third place. NBC edged ABC among those viewers, an encouraging showing for Gibson.

Williams and Gibson have stuck with more traditional newscasts, while Couric is doing a faster-paced program with such new wrinkles as a daily commentary segment.

McManus, noting that all new anchors lose ground in the early months, dismisses suggestions that the broadcast contains less hard news.

"I don't think the mix of our stories is all that much different," he says. "For years there's been this cry that someone should try to do something different in the evening news time period, and we're trying to do that. You can't have it both ways."

Pushing a Publisher

Carl Hiaasen, the Miami Herald's best-known writer, was stunned last month when an editor told him that his latest column was being spiked -- so stunned that he said he would quit.

The popular novelist was particularly incensed when told that 1,100 people had already canceled their subscriptions over the subject of his column -- the firing of two journalists at the Spanish-language edition, El Nuevo Herald. "After 30 years you're going to yank one of my columns, not for journalistic reasons but because you're afraid of losing subscribers?" Hiaasen recalls saying. "You can't muzzle a column based on what might happen with a very vocal minority group. That's crazy."

Hiaasen believed that Publisher Jesus Diaz Jr. was behind the move -- and it turned out he was right.

Diaz had dismissed the El Nuevo Herald journalists for accepting payments for appearances on the government-run channels beamed into Cuba, Radio Martí and TV Martí. Hiaasen's satirical column addressed Diaz: " Lighten up, bro ! You're right: Once a reporter starts cashing a government paycheck, his or her credibility as a public watchdog is shot. But how about a teeny exception for TV Martí? Lots of folks in the newsroom could use the extra dough, and nobody will ever see them on the air because Castro jams the signals."

After Hiaasen complained to a friend at McClatchy Co., which recently bought the Herald, the parent company interceded and the column was published. The fired staffers were reinstated on the grounds that their editors had acquiesced in the moonlighting. And Diaz resigned last week, saying the controversy had "created an environment that no longer allows me to lead our newspapers."

Dreaming of TomKat

What a scoop! Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, moving to the Washington area!

The Washington Examiner, last Wednesday: "Sources tell us that the pair is putting the final ink on a contract for a $22 million behemoth of a home in Upperville, Va."

The Washington Examiner, last Thursday: "The buzz looks to be a bust."