DAN RATHER DROPS HIS LOW-KEY STYLE

At the urging of his bosses, Dan Rather substantially altered his delivery on “The CBS Evening News” for the first week of August. He was low-key. He talked slowly and quietly. He was a Valium.

On Monday, Aug. 10, the old Dan Rather returned; the new Dan Rather was ditched. “I listened. I tried to soak up the advice and council of more than a few people around here about how to improve my performance,” Rather said later. “I tried it and it didn’t work.”

CBS News will have to find some other way of raising the ratings of a broadcast that for years was proudly in first place and now, often as not, finishes the week a humbling third.

Changing Rather into Danny Do-Right was prompted by a belief that his at-attention manner of delivering the news is too “intense,” and that “NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw” is often No. 1 because viewers find Brokaw soothing and relaxing.

“I kept hearing that we should be laid-back, homogenized, ‘yuppie-fied’ because that’s the fashion of the ‘80s,” says Rather. “I don’t know that to be true. I’m not sure I even know what it means. I don’t know how to do that well and I am not sure I want to.

“I’m a worker, and I’m a learner,” Rather says. “I’m trying to learn this so-called ‘80s style, but I don’t really believe in it.”

For CBS News, the fall from supremacy by its flagship broadcast is the latest in a continuing, almost self-parodistic series of organizational calamities. Asked if he has been agonizing over the ratings and whether he blames himself, Rather says, “Probably yes on both counts. I see it as accountability. Increasingly what happens in society is nobody steps forward to say, ‘I’m accountable.’ ”

Rather does not claim, as some in TV news occasionally do, that the ratings mean nothing to him. “The scoreboard lights up every Tuesday,” Rather says, referring to the day the previous week’s ratings come out. “And when we look up on Tuesday now, the news has not been very good.” Last week, the “Evening News” was third again, a sliver behind “ABC World News Tonight.” NBC was first, its 17th week in the top slot.

Reportedly, CBS News President Howard Stringer and “Evening News” executive producer Tom Bettag were among those urging Rather to be cooler, softer and more dispassionate on the air. One CBS News insider says Rather took the advice to an extreme to make the advisers look silly. Rather denies this.

That Rather is too “intense” has become an industry cliche, and it doesn’t explain why his newscast was No. 1 for 214 straight weeks, since he has been intense all along. Since the ratings are so mercurial, and since the “Evening News” ratings are affected by many factors irrelevant to the quality of the program, Rather is asked why he doesn’t just ignore them and plunge on. “Most of the time I can,” he says. “Most of the time I have. This is not one of those times.” Hard ball. It’s time for hard ball.

Rumors persist of plans afoot to team Rather with a co-anchor, perhaps Diane Sawyer, but executives and spokesmen regularly shoot them down. It would be precipitous, insiders believe, to make any such changes before the 1988 elections, partly because elections tend to bring out the best in Rather and the top-ranked CBS News correspondents.

Will there be any “radical changes” evident in the Rather newscast come September, once the summer experiments are over? “Whatever else you may have read to the contrary, Dan Rather is not a radical,” Rather says. “We’re adjusting and looking and trying to push ourselves to improve.”

Rather says published reports that he is seriously thinking about retiring from the brutal hurly-burly are preposterous, and that despite all the turmoil, he has hardly reached the fed-up point yet.

“No. No way,” Rather says. “Absolutely not. I’m not the fed-up type. I’m the get-up-and-do-something type.”

If Rather’s passion and zeal for the news are scaring viewers away, what does that say about viewers? “Max Headroom,” the supposedly computer-generated anchor thing and talk show host starring on ABC and Cinemax, might be the future of TV news after all.

Of the three journalists now anchoring the nightly network newscasts, Rather is the one who could least be justifiably called Robo-Anchor (and Brokaw is the one who most justifiably could be). Not only does the future look cold, but also the present as well.

Rather, despite his insistence that he wants to hang in there and slug it out, also says he can conceive of not being the anchor of “The CBS Evening News.” Isn’t a national anchor’s job like the President’s in that everything after is anticlimax? “I don’t think so,” Rather says. “I’ve had so many good jobs that I know I can be happy doing a lot of different things.” Then he waxes wistful about having spotted a black bear during a recent fishing trip in upstate New York, and of being so impressed that he took a step backward and fell into the drink.

“It’s been 25 years since I’ve seen a bear in the wild,” marvels Rather. “I saw a wolf too.” He sounds so much more excited about this than about contemplating the next hare-brained scheme to boost the ratings of “The CBS Evening News.”