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Q&A with Dan Rather: Tweeting, moving away from ‘just the facts,’ and idealism in journalism


A: First of all, I spent most of my career from the time I was in my early teens trying to be an honest broker of information — your classic straight reporter. Just the facts, ma’am. I don’t mean that in any preaching way, but that’s how I was trying to be seen. I would say somewhere around midcareer, in maybe my early 50s, I began to try to do something called analysis, which is take the facts and connect the dots, connect the facts, because we know as some wise person once said, “You can do all the facts and not know the truth.” So I got into a situation where I said, “Okay, I’ll try to do what my mentors, Eric Sevareid and my idol Edward R. Murrow, try to do, in addition to true straight news reporting, is to do analysis.” In more recent years, let’s face it, I haven’t had the resources to be the kind of legwork, shoe-leather, first-person, on-the-ground, witness-to-history kind of reporter that I once was trying to be. I went through a period where I said to myself, “Look, it’s pretty much over for you. You’ve had a good run. You certainly made your mistakes. And you have your wounds, some of them self-inflicted. But nonetheless, it’s pretty much a career.” But that didn’t last very long. For one thing, Donald Trump came along.

Q: And Trump was different.

A: I concluded fairly early on during the campaign, before he was elected, that he could be dangerous to the society as a whole. You can say that’s arrogant, maybe a certain amount of conceit. I don’t see it that way. The late Elie Wiesel, I’m honored to say, was a friend of mine, and he once said, “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” So when you ask me what I’m trying to do, number one, what I’m attempting to signal to people when I do a post on Twitter, Facebook or write something for my news site is basically I’m trying to say is, “Folks, I don’t know everything and you can argue I know very little. But I’ve been blessed and lucky to live a long time, and I’ve been a few places and seen a few things, and I want to try to put what’s happening to us now in context, particularly to give it some historical perspective, and say what I believe.” That’s a different role for me.

Q: I flip between Fox and MSNBC, and I’ll see on Fox scientific fact being disputed. And then I’ll turn to MSNBC host Brian Williams, who will report on Trump and then wink and say, “Back in the real world.” There’s part of me that likes that and part of me that doesn’t, because he’s a powerful figure. I think it opens him up to criticism from a huge group of people who will say, “You’re in the tank with the anti-Trump people.” Right?

A: I agree with that. And I also share your ambivalence. On the one hand, I rather like it and respect it. The other part of me says there are going to be people who jump on you and call you all kinds of names and diminish your reputation. . . . It’s dangerous, but it is part of this new environment. Look, I left the anchor desk in 2005 after 24 years, and you can argue that maybe I stayed too long. I never thought so, but I tried to do the best I could. But even then, the distance between 2005 and 2020 in terms of how journalism in this country has evolved is pretty staggering. Never mind going back as far as the 1970s when Walter Cronkite sort of ruled supreme at the anchor desk.

The financial model on which most modern American journalism was based has almost disappeared. And with it, journalism is struggling to find a new business model that can support the kind of deep digging, investigative reporting and first-class international reporting that until very recently was suffering greatly.

Q: In June, amid the George Floyd protests, you tweeted, “Looking back over my life, I see times when the world took a path to becoming a better place, imperfect, uneven steps, but progress nonetheless. Often this rallying for what was right occurred amid darkness and strife. I believe this is such a moment.” We went from this period where we were all talking about the coronavirus, which is still with us and has not diminished. But there was this tragic moment with Floyd, and with Black Lives Matter, and now we’ve seen a reawakening in our country.

A: And to extrapolate from that, this is a unique moment in the history of the country because we have a pandemic and economic struggles and a political crisis. I struggle for the word, but dysfunctional comes to mind. Never mind what your worries are about policy or something, but it seems to be dysfunctional. And at the same time, we have exterior threats — North Korea, the Russians, Eastern Europe, Iran, China. So all this comes together. And from a journalist standpoint, and people who aren’t in journalism may not understand this, but this is as big a story as I’ve ever covered. I’m not going to kid anybody about that.

Q: Do you think this can be fixed somehow?

A: I’m an optimist by nature and by experience. So my answer is, yes, it can be fixed. The question is, will it be fixed or will we fix it? I do think one important thing is what we mentioned earlier — finding a business model that will support quality journalism. And I think it’s important for young journalists, aspiring journalists not to lose their idealism. And the idealism in journalism is honesty and integrity with the goal saying to yourself, “I’m doing this because I want to be part of something bigger. I want to be part of something that matters.” . . . If we can keep the spark of that idealism alive and sort of fanned the spark into a flame, then, yes, I think we can fix it. But I acknowledge it does hang in the balance.



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