Rather exits; is the end near?

Dan Rather didn’t die Tuesday, but “Dan Rather” did.

That Rather had aged into caricature status (the brush cut, the weird glare, the Texas drawl) was being advanced even by his own network, which on election night kept e-mailing reporters Rather colloquialisms, so-called Danisms, including: “It don’t mean a thing if they don’t get those swings,” and: “This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex.”

Rather, it is said beyond the official statements, is stepping down ahead of the potential for more embarrassing details from a CBS investigation into his Sept. 8 report on “60 Minutes” that President Bush received preferential treatment during his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard. The 73-year-old anchor initially stood by the story and then was forced to contort himself into an apology for its reliance on apparently bogus documents. The Rather watch had begun.

No doubt CBS News will replace Rather with a sober-faced, good-looking white male who reads a TelePrompTer extremely well, never flubbing the line, “In Fallouja tonight ... “ This is as much as you can say at this point for Brian Williams, who is set to step into the anchor chair being vacated Dec. 2 by another lion in winter, “NBC News’ ” Tom Brokaw.

On CNN Tuesday, Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff cast the departures of Rather and Brokaw as harbingers of a larger death -- the death of network news. And the networks, Wolff said, are in fact happy about this, because Brokaw’s and Rather’s exits “hastens the day when [the networks] can get out of this business.”

Why, it doesn’t seem hard to wonder, would the networks want to continue to compete for eyeballs when television has trained viewers to seek out the instant visual and/or opinion 24 hours a day? It used to matter that an anchor came on once a day and told you what was important to know about the world. Nowadays the anchors are interchangeable, and everything they tell you leaves you on edge.

CBS is now saying Rather will continue on the network as a correspondent for “60 Minutes,” but surely Rather the character will now fade from view.

This is a loss. At a time when network news is hemorrhaging audience share to the Wild West of cable news, how many anchors can boast both that they were punched in the solar plexus at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and that they were the subject of a homage by the rock group R.E.M., which had a hit, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” based on a bizarre 1986 incident in which Rather was attacked on a Manhattan street?

This is what TV news anchors no longer seem to have -- messy, real-world experiences that resonate across generational lines. Rather first made his national reputation in the 1960s with on-the-spot coverage of Hurricane Carla in Galveston, Texas. Some 40 years later, CNN’s Anderson Cooper did the same thing, rushing to Florida this summer to stand in 75 mile-per-hour winds during a hurricane. As he kept his balance, Cooper looked into the camera and assured his mother he would be all right.

The story was not the hurricane but that Cooper had gone to the hurricane. Rather, 24 years anchoring “CBS News,” worked long enough to become part of this celebritization of TV news personalities. The difference between Cooper and Rather is that Cooper came to CNN after hosting the ABC reality series “The Mole,” while Rather came to the CBS news anchor desk from reality -- the JFK assassination, Vietnam.