Former "CBS Evening News" anchor and "60 Minutes" host, Dan Rather, doesn't believe in retirement.
At age 82, he's still on the job. Two years ago, he released an autobiography about his life in journalism titled "Rather Unspoken" and he hosts a weekly news show, "Dan Rather Reports," that airs on AXS TV.
Rather has worked in journalism for 64 years, beginning on the radio in 1950 in Huntsville, Texas. Over the decades, he has witnessed firsthand the Kennedy assassination, the space race, the Watergate scandal, the wars in Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
But he says he couldn't have covered some of the half-century's biggest stories without the support of his wife of 57 years. And, he says in order to maintain a free and independent press, reporters need integrity and courage — two qualities that he fears reporters, including himself, lack at times today.
Last week, Rather sat down with Deseret News' Candice Madsen to discuss the future of journalism, his career and his advice to young reporters.
Deseret News: When you signed off from the "CBS Evening News," you talked about courage and the need for journalists to be willing to risk it all to report the truth. Do you think enough journalists today have that courage?
Dan Rather: No, and that includes myself on any given day. There are plenty of wonderful journalists practicing today and many of them have a lot of courage, but it is a tougher environment today in American journalism than any time in my lifetime. There has been so much consolidation of the media into ever-increasing large entities that it is very difficult these days to be a journalist dedicated to quality journalism, integrity and courage. And I do not exempt myself from that criticism. We need a spine transplant. Journalists are supposed to have guts and so often we don't.
DN: What are the positives in journalism today?
Rather: There are all kinds of positives. First of all, American journalists with all of the difficulties, some of which I've spoken out about — consolidation of media, politicization of news organizations, trivialization of the news through celebrity hunting, of which I am as guilty as maybe anybody else — but despite all those things, American journalism is the freest in the world. It is still a craft dedicated to speaking and reporting the truth. On any given day, somewhere, some journalist still does that.
I'm very optimistic about the future. Part of the difficulty now is that we've entered the Internet age. I'm old enough to come out of print, into radio, into television and now into the digital era. We are on the front edge of the digital age. So, everybody is adjusting in every industry and profession to the new realities of the Internet age — none more so than journalism. I'm very optimistic about the future, but it is true I am an optimist by nature, so we have to discount a little bit for that.
DN: What is it like to go from waiting for the ratings to come out, to the Internet where you can get instant feedback on your stories?
Rather: To go from the environment where you know — and everybody in local network and over the air broadcasting knows — that ratings and demographics are virtually everything … to the digital world, to the vast beyond of the Internet, where there aren't ratings, there aren't demographics but there is a rough equivalent in the number of hits, frankly, that is one of the better aspects of moving into the digital age. The number of hits you get when you put something up on the Internet and how many people respond to it is not as sensitive to ratings and demographics as the rest of broadcasting.
DN: You've taken a lot of risks over your career, including putting your life at risk, but for more than 50 years your wife Jean has stood by your side. How crucial has she been to your success?
Rather: Well, in absolutely everything. That fighting-hard Jean Goebel Rather, to whom I've been married for more than 57 years, signed on for life as a journalist. We had no idea when we got married that I would ever work for CBS News, or ever cover combat, or ever be a foreign correspondent. That seemed too much to dream. Obviously, without her I couldn't have made it. I never would have gotten out of Houston, which is where I went to work when I first came out of the Marines.
In journalism, every job, every craft, every undertaking has its stresses and strains on a marriage in one way or the other. Journalism, I do think, is particularly hard on relationships. If you are a world-class journalist or aspire to be a world-class journalist and you go into war zones and you are a foreign correspondent, you can be away from home a lot. I tell young people I love journalism and journalism can be a great life — it has certainly been a great life for me — but it is hell on relationships. I tell them to be careful because it has unique strains on relationships, partly because there is so much travel and partly because you mention danger. I don't want to be overdramatic about it, but on some days and in some ways danger is my business. And that can be very tough when you have a wife and, in my case, two kids at home.
DN: How did you strike the balance? You talk about going into a war zone and then coming home and adjusting to family life. How did you manage that?
Rather: Not very well, I think. But that is where Jean Rather, my wife, comes into play. Her view was “listen, I support you completely, totally, absolutely, without question. But when you come home out of a war zone, or after a long tour as a foreign correspondent, or after covering a campaign, when you come home try to hit the off switch. Hit the off switch. You may be here for only a short time, but in that short time be in the moment with us.” And when I managed to handle that even half decently, that was the key.
DN: You haven't slowed down since you left CBS and you are now hosting a documentary series for AXS TV. It seems like you are enjoying your career as much now as ever.
Rather: I do enjoy it now as much as ever. In some ways, these are the best years for me. I can be as dumb as a fence post about a lot of things, but I am at least smart enough to know that I am very lucky at this age and stage of my career to have full-time work and work for which I have a great passion. But it is true I've never been the smartest person around or the smartest person on any beat. I was raised by people who told me, “Listen, you may not be the smartest person, but nobody should out-work you.” And when you have a passion for your work, as I have, then it is easy. It has been easy for me to have the attitude to always move full-throttle forward. And be looking ahead. I can't wait to get to the next story when my feet hit the floor in the morning. I'm thinking about where is the story and how do I get to the heart of it. I'm very lucky and blessed to have that at this point in life.
DN: It seems like you've always appreciated hitting the ground running because as a young boy you had rheumatic fever and were in bed for years. How did that trial influence the rest of your life?
Rather: In retrospect, it might have been the making of me, for better or for worse, that I had rheumatic fever for several years off and on between roughly ages 10-and-a-half and 14. At that time, rheumatic fever was an incurable disease. It was every mother's nightmare, second only to polio, because there was no known cure. I was bedridden for very long stretches of time. Particularly, the stage when you are moving into puberty and adolescence is a peculiar time in any child's life. To be bedridden during that time, I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do. It also gave me a sense of how precious every moment of life is. Now, I'm not saying that I managed to articulate all of that to myself at the time, but looking back on it, the time was very formative for me.
The other thing was, once the doctors said that I could get up and get around, I was emaciated. I was very thin and I had no strength and my father made a critical decision for me. He said, “It is make or break for him if he is going to get his physical strength back or not.” So, I went to work with a pipeline brush cutting crew where it was physical labor from dawn until after dark, sweating on the Texas coast. The point is that it didn't allow me to feel sorry for myself. I was working among grown men at age 14 and among them, you either cut it or you didn’t. And fortunately I did. It was, in many ways, the making of me.
DN: You've had an incredible career and I grew up watching you with my parents. And I loved your “Ratherisms.” You always had colorful analogies for which you became famous and you were always authentic. How has that authenticity helped your career and, maybe even, at sometimes hurt your career?
Rather: Well, I do think the important thing for journalists is to be authentic. It’s important to be yourself because the audience has almost an unerring tuning fork for who is authentic and who isn't. I spoke like I grew up speaking. I grew up around people who work with their back and their hands all day long. When you do, you get tired of just saying it is hot or it is hot as hell. So, you say more colorful language to express what you want to say. You say, “it's hotter than a Laredo parking lot” or “it’s hotter than a Cadillac in Brownsville” as a way of using new, fresh language to make the day go by. It strikes some people as corny. I understand that, but on long nights like election night when you are ad-libbing for hours on end — sometimes you go on the air at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and you are not off until 8 o'clock the next morning — you can only say it is a close race so many times without it becoming boring. And so you try to come up with more colorful language. You know, this race is tick tight, it is hotter than a depot stove, or this candidate is out of place like a moose in a phone booth. Those kinds of things I think livened up the evening. Did everybody like them? No. In that sense perhaps it cost me something, but it was and remains authentic.
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