Dan Rather remembers the exact moment he knew it was time to look for a new job. It was when his bosses at CBS told him that they were sick and tired of hearing all that stuff about the hallowed tradition of Edward R. Murrow.
''That's what they told me -- they wanted to be through and finished with the Murrow tradition and things that had gone before,'' Rather says, referring to the pioneering broadcast reporter who virtually invented television news at CBS during the early 1950s.
CBS President Leslie Moonves 'said that on at least two occasions. Don't make it sound that I'm critical of that. He said, `Murrow is dead and gone, Rather had his time, and we want to go in different directions.' Which he's entitled to do.''
(snip)
Though the program will go wherever the news takes it, Rather will pursue what he calls ''signature pieces'' in three areas. One will feature ''the voices of people who are actually fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what it's like to be there, what it's like to come home . . . what Ernie Pyle used to call the grunts and the dogfaces.'' A second is the economic difficulties of middle-income Americans and ``their struggles to keep themselves in that category.''
The third, predictably, is politics. It was political coverage that turned Rather into a household name -- as a CBS rookie accompanying President Kennedy on a political trip to Dallas in 1963, he found himself the lead reporter on the assassination -- and political coverage that ultimately ended his network career when a story on President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service exploded in his face. That experience did nothing to temper his fascination.
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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/columnists/glenn_garvin/15982657.htm
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