Dan is the Man....Again
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After figuring out the frequency, Dan Rather is back and is taking aim at Donald Trump. (for you kids that have no idea what that means...Google it)
The former CBS Anchor is finding a new life on social media and he is not afraid to tell people what he thinks.
Rather has a huge following on Facebook, his own show on satellite radio and is making a number of appearances, where he spends much of the time calling out Donald Trump.
He denounces Trump’s dismissals of facts: “Any argument that 2 and 2 equals 5 is not an ‘alternate fact.’ It’s untrue. Water does not run uphill. Gravity exists. It’s a truth.” Rather was met with roars of approval.
Politico writes that the last time people were paying this much attention to Rather, he was at the center of his own blowup over fake news. More than a decade ago, Rather was ousted from CBS in the wake of a flawed investigation into President George W. Bush’s National Guard duty during the Vietnam War. Rather’s downfall after 24 years as the face of the network was a cause for celebration on the right and quiet discomfort on the left. Instead of retiring, though, the man who was the heir to Walter Cronkite and was watched at his peak by 18 million people every night took a job with HDNet, a low-profile cable outlet owned by Mark Cuban now called AXS TV, toiling in relative obscurity hosting a news show and interviewing musicians.
Now, though, in an unexpected, career-redefining resurrection aided by Trump’s shocking ascent, Rather has clawed back a piece of the spotlight. The improbable vehicle for this 85 year old former network Anchor is Facebook.
Rather’s personal page has more than 2 million likes, his “News and Guts” page has another million-plus, and his posts are seen, shared and read by millions more. On average, "News and Guts" gets more likes, comments and shares per post than BuzzFeed, USA Today or CNN.
“However you feel about Trump personally,” Rather said in the saloon, “to have this kind of chaos, bordering on havoc, with a new president coming in—that’s something new, and very, very dangerous.”
Rather says he's worries about Journalism and what is happening to it.
Journalism always has been a high-low mix—Rather remembers, fondly, an editor at the old Houston Press saying that what sold newspapers was “tits and tots, pets and vets”—but he also believes that balance has been getting progressively more out of whack since the ’80s. “What happened with journalism,” he told me in Austin, “journalism as a whole, but particularly with television journalism, is what I call the politicalization, corporatization and the trivialization of the news. Trivialization is where the Trump wing of this comes in.”
Rather promises to stand up to the Trump administration.
Of those not standing up to Trump, he wrote in January: “History will mark their names.”
