Rather

Sometimes you investigate, you get to the end of the alley,

and what you thought was there is not there.

To get to the truth,

or as close to the truth as is humanly possible to get,

requires a lot of persistence.

And also you have to be prepared to pay the consequences,

that any very controversial story one does involving powerful people,

eventually you're going to have to face the furnace and take the heat,

and unless you're prepared to do that,

then you need to get another line of work.

Testing, testing, testing, testing, testing testing.

Dan Rather has become the symbol of television journalism.

Live from Tiananmen Square…

…from Baghdad, Iraq.

…near the Cambodian border, South Vietnam.

It's in the nature of reporters and politicians not to get along.

That goes with the territory.

- Are you running for something? - No, sir, Mr. President. Are you?

Rather is just a son of a bitch, don't you think?

How I see myself is as a watch dog.

I'm not an attack dog, I'm not out to get anybody,

but I'm not a lap dog either.

Don't push me take your hands off of me unless you plan to arrest me.

The fact that Dan Rather is located by some people

as a uniquely malevolent figure

is merely evidence that he has done his job.

When people talk about liberal media,

a lot of times they're really talking literally about Dan Rather, the man.

This lady thinks Dan Rather's ears should be pinned back.

I've always found Dan Rather to be a little odd.

She ran away with it like a hobo with a sweet potato pie.

Yeah!

It was a big mistake, but does it mean the end of Dan Rather?

Rather now became the story.

It was a damaging moment for media culture.

Rather, the godfather of modern media fake news

talking about how this is the greatest crisis we've ever seen

- in modern political history. - From that point on

it really is the start of a different kind of journalistic world.

My teenagers don't even watch evening news,

but they know Dan Rather.

The level of shade on this man… Whew!

Do you not give a shit anymore, Dan?

Short answer: No.

I've never known why it is that I aspired to be a reporter.

The best guess that I can come up with is that because my mother and father

were so riveted to newspapers.

Newspapers were around the house, they were discussing newspapers.

At an early age, I came to believe newspapers must be important.

So the dream for me was always to be "a reporter."

Keep in mind at that time,

being a reporter basically meant being a newspaper person.

The television news revolution was only just beginning.

There were the three TV networks: CBS, ABC and NBC.

CBS was known as the Tiffany Network.

They were the gold standard, and there wasn't a lot of choice.

The benefit of that was that everybody had the same grounding in reality.

CBS News built an amazing organization and reputation.

Literally were like The New York Times of television.

This is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

There may be something brewing in Cuba,

besides coffee, that is. For the first time…

Walter Cronkite was the most admired man in America,

and he developed a bipartisan following.

There was a widespread belief among the people who owned the networks

that a network news division was a public trust.

There's an enormous responsibility that goes with being a broadcaster,

that you're talking to literally 20 million people.

Here is Dan Rather speaking directly from Galveston.

As of the moment, Hurricane Carla is spotted near latitude 26.0 north

and 92.9 west, that's 255 miles southeast of…

I was the news director broadcasting live from Galveston.

The story became a national story,

and first CBS News began monitoring what we were doing.

These are by far the calmest people in a flood I've ever seen.

We superimposed a scale map of the Texas coast

onto the Galveston radar image of this gigantic storm

which put the storm in perspective.

Nobody had ever done it before.

About half a million people took one look at it

and basically fled to higher ground.

That job at the television station as anchor

had resulted in our coverage of the hurricane,

which CBS had seen and as result of that hired me,

and so by 1962 I'm working at CBS News.

But very quickly having gone to New York,

moved back to Dallas to open the Dallas Bureau,

and the biggest, most important running domestic story

was Dr. Martin Luther King

and the early stages of the civil rights movement.

The Negroes who live in this rural area have been told for years

that that moss-covered oak back there,

was a hanging tree during the time of the Civil War.

I think my dad had a certain destiny that he listened to.

He had a calling to do what he does.

My dad is a deeply, deeply religious person.

- Start walking. - Right.

My dad reads the Bible often. It's a source of comfort to him.

His faith, that you love your fellow man,

and his particular way of showing love is reporting.

The Albany Movement depends on these people,

they are the heart of it.

This is Dan Rather in Albany, Georgia.

The violence against us,

the destruction of any little sense of progress and prosperity that we had,

just to keep people down,

that was not known until television came.

There was a lot of violence,

women, children, older men, threatened, beaten,

dogs turned loose on them, fire hoses turned loose on them.

Klan rallies at night. Terrible Klan rallies.

You got a bunch of people standing right over here

with their cameras and their news things.

Half of them ain't got enough backbone to get them a job and go to work.

They'll print half of the story.

They ain't got enough backbone to tell the truth.

Anybody that lies with the devil will die and go to hell without God.

The sights, sounds, smells…

I do remember even the smell of the wooden cross burning.

And I defy anyone to go to a Klan rally

and not be deeply affected by what it really represented.

Deep hate.

For the first time I began to understand

what this emerging civil rights movement was about,

and I began to see up-close, personal,

bear witness to the violence of institutionalized racism.

If the bombings do not stop,

someone is going to be confronted with a full-scale race riot here,

because I know of people personally that's not going to be tolerated with,

bombing in their sleep and shooting them on the streets.

CBS was called the Colored Broadcasting System,

the Communist Broadcasting System.

Station after station wouldn't feed our material,

some stations wouldn't carry the CBS Evening News.

We were often accused of being liberal in the news media.

That's what a journalist is, a seeker of causes,

but we, I believe, presented the truth.

Mr. Singleman, you must be aware that at least one Northern newspaper

has termed you a bigot and a racist. What's your reaction to that?

They can call me anything they want

as long as they don't call me too late for dinner.

We always had our demonstrations in the morning.

We had to be through by twelve o'clock

because they'd have to take-off

and fly the news back to New York every day.

I was very impressed with Dr. King from the moment I met him.

I had never seen anyone up close and personal that heroic.

Now let's move out or you're under arrest. Either one now.

Moment to moment, on the razor's edge of lethal danger.

The fear that I felt seeing this deep hate changed me as a person,

and changed me as a professional.

The press was hated almost as much as we were

so it required a lot of courage just to tell the story,

because the same people that were beating us up,

started beating them up.

Then there was guilt,

something nobody really likes to talk about.

I have the job I dreamed of doing,

but I did have those moments, and I said, "Easy for you, Dan."

"Should you just quit this work"

"and become part of the active effort to change this?"

As a journalist you're not saying, "Damn it, I want this to be fixed"

or "Damn it, I'm going to cause the change."

You're showing people what happens,

they decide what to do with that information.

Savannah, Georgia which has had more racial violence

the past few weeks than any other city in the Deep South is not…

The role I'm in as being a chronicler of this,

being an eyewitness to it

and bringing it to people's screens, is important work.

This is Dan Rather in Savannah, Georgia.

It was very difficult as reporters

during this period covering Dr. King and the movement.

On the one hand, you wanna be an honest broker of information.

On the other hand, some of the things were so outrageous, so disturbing,

there was a constant struggle within yourself to say,

"Remember what your role is here."

You wanna be the witness, that's your job,

and you're trained as a journalist to do it,

and for me that all started in Houston.

Stand by, please.

I began working at the radio station KTRH, 50,000-watt,

Voice of the Golden Gulf Coast in Houston.

I've gotten a job there beginning in late 1954.

I was on the air, I was doing play-by-play work.

- Again, Dan Rather. - Houston leads…

All that experience at the tiny radio station

paid enormous dividends later on,

because I was in the process of making myself a strong ad-libber,

frequently with no script,

and that gave me the confidence that I could talk and describe

and create word pictures,

and I don't think I would've made it in television without that ability.

It was fast becoming a kind of dream job for me,

but from time to time, you know, I certainly wanted a family,

and there came to work at the radio station Jean Grace Goebel.

First time I saw her, I know it's cliche but it's true,

it was "Wow."

She has such a winning smile.

Just everything about her got my immediate attention.