A smooth docu-drama on a 12-year-old news-report controversy highlights
a news producer who seems to have been railroaded*
Fifteenth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking
askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now
*The series title and subheads
in some parts echo one of the film’s theses, but details are combed over in
this mini-series partly to determine the title’s truth.
[Edits 8/8/16.]
Subsections below:
[introduction]
A story old and yet with relevant aspects; and a sketchy history of CBS
anchormen
[Story key A] Sidebar—The messy
story in a nutshell
Humorous sidebar: Another
anchorman’s missteps (a controversy in 2015)
To come in Part 2:
[introduction]
[Story key A] Sidebar—The messy
story in a nutshell
The trajectories of the two careers involved—Rather’s and Mapes’
“Hoist with their typeface”: The issue of the Killian documents, which still
seems to stick in some controversy-principals’ craw (which I’d like to set
aside, so the principals’ case can still be respected)
To come in Part 3:
[Story key B] Sidebar—A “score
card” of the Texas Guard supervisors (and one or two others) who are relevant
The film’s story focusing on Mapes; and my main theses
Mapes’ memoir’s rooting and compelling nuggets, and my “meshing” a bit
[sub-subsection heads withheld
here]
To come in Part 4:
Last nuggets from
Mapes’ memoir
The dense, misguided last-minute
editing
The document experts
Bill Burkett,
relatively close up
A sketchy argument: Judging
how much, or when, a case holds water
The debate between
old media and new (Internet) media
To come in Part 5 (among other
content):
How well does the film do? What do you readers need to “study up on”
before seeing this film?
This entry also reviews, to an
extent: Dan Rather, Rather Outspoken: My
Life in the News (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012); and Mary
Mapes, Truth and Duty: The Press, the
President, and the Privilege of Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
(See disclaimer at end of this
entry. I am not out to throw darts at CBS News; in fact, I regularly listen to
its news on Newsradio 880 and in the evening news in the New York area [the
Channel 2 and the network news], and 60
Minutes has long been my favorite TV program. Shows how nerdy I am.)
“Mary [Mapes]
is a real reporter, an indefatigable reporter—the kind you make movies about.”
—Dan Rather,
in his autobiography, Rather Outspoken,
p. 36
Starting in the spring, I took
out Dan Rather’s autobio (Rather
Outspoken: My Life in the News) for two four-week periods, all in
anticipation of doing a careful review of this film. Alas, I was unable to
spend as much time on the book as I’d wanted, though I did reread, with
interest, the section on the September 2004 George W. Bush/Air National Guard
news piece and how it contributed to Rather’s “downfall” at CBS News. (I’d
already read this episode a couple years ago or so.) Enough odd stuff has been
going on in my life lately, with a busy enough work schedule for this summer
for some weeks, that I have put off completing this review…while additional
reading has come into the picture (Mary Mapes’ memoir Truth and Duty [St. Martin’s, 2005]). (I took out Rather’s book
again recently.)
Meanwhile, enough has been said
about Rather’s end with CBS—in the news, in his lawsuit against CBS filed in September
2007, in his autobio of 2012 (Grand Central Publishing), and now in this 2015
film, which itself was in development for about seven years—that I don’t
expect, nor would I want, to say anything definitive
about his anchorman’s career’s ending, even in my limited-aims review style.
(Rather’s suit in 2007 alleged, among other issues, “breach of contract,
interference with prospective economic advantage, and fraud, based on CBS’s
‘intentional mishandling’ of the aftermath of the Bush/Guard story” [his
autobio, p. 228].)
A story old and yet with relevant aspects; and a sketchy history of CBS
anchormen
I found the film Truth very interesting, but after seeing
it one and a half times, I had to return it to the library (on a
rapid-turnaround set of library terms) and also felt I could do it more justice
later in the year. For those who like All
the President’s Men (1976), and I suspect mostly journalism students value that today (but probably others
politically-minded do, too), Truth is
a pretty solid, competently done example of the genre. (I intend to view Truth again in coming days or weeks, as
is needed to round out this review.)
I would suggest that those
interested in the film read up on the political/journalism issues first—get a
handle (from Wikipedia and elsewhere) on the issues of President George W. Bush
and his deficient service in the Air National Guard of 1968-73, and how CBS
reported the matter in September 2004, and the fallout from this (most known
about is Dan Rather’s stepping down in 2005 as anchorman for the national CBS
News [though he’d been set to retire about a year later, anyway]). Rather’s 2012
autobio has a very useful account—it is all of detailed, crisply eloquent, and
readable—but maybe if you can find Mary Mapes’ book, that would prepare you,
too, in especially useful ways. (This book seems a relatively rare bird in the New York State
[Story key A] Sidebar—The messy story in a nutshell: On September 8, 2004, a
story about George W. Bush was included in the second 60 Minutes program CBS ran in those days—60 Minutes II, it was called (having started in about 1998; the
program’s first name Wikipedia articles repeatedly get wrong); it would
eventually (in late 2004) be renamed 60
Minutes Wednesday, and be canceled in 2005 (Mapes, p. 335). Meanwhile, the
old and staid 60 Minutes that had run
since 1968 (and still does today, on Sunday; in TV terms, this means it’s been
on “forever”) was still on. 60 Minutes II
was a sort of junior-league program compared to its parent, with an angle to be
a bit lighter (no surprise).
The September 8
segment on George W. Bush and his service in the Texas Air National Guard
(starting in May 1968 and last documented as having any active status in May
1972, with a May 1973 report suggesting Bush had done nothing documented in
this service for a year, and with his receiving an honorable discharge in
October 1973, six months before his six-year term would ordinarily have ended).
Dan Rather—who in those days, due to CBS News internal politics (alluded to in
Rather’s and Mapes’ memoirs), could not have segments appear on the Sunday parent
program—was the correspondent for the Bush segment. Mary Mapes was the lead
“producer” for the segment, having worked on the story with several other
people all of whom had solid track records as TV producers, researchers, or the
like. After the story ran, starting the morning after it was broadcast, there
welled up tremendous controversy mostly from members of the public, with blog
postings especially presenting statements, arguments, and vitriol, with the
potential of the Internet—in a sort of Googlebombing (what Rather calls a “blog
swarm”)—to both noisily and attention-winningly present an issue, and make it
seem to have wings and extent beyond what traditional media used to be able to
do.
The central
point of controversy was that documents presented in the report, allegedly
written by a Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, who had been an officer in
the Texas Air National Guard when Bush was in it and who was Bush’s supervising
superior, were argued to be forgeries. In the aftermath, Rather issued an
apology (on or just after September 20, and via a written statement [Mapes, pp.
233-34] as well as, I believe, a notice given on the evening news) for the
Killian memos and for the now-purported deficiency of the September 8 report.
Later CBS had an investigation of the reporting done by a panel headed by
former Attorney General, and a Republican, Richard Thornburgh, and the ex-CEO
of the Associated Press, Louis Boccardi. As a result of this, in early 2005
Mary Mapes was fired by CBS as a producer. Dan Rather, who would have retired
in 2006 anyway, was led to step down as CBS News anchorman in March 2005. Other
CBS employees were led to resign, with at least some receiving financial
settlements in legal arrangements (per Rather).
I think this is the least
controversial way the matter can be summarized, but I tell you, there are
considerable details surrounding the situation, both regarding how Mapes
developed the story (and, indeed, what her own respectable career in TV
journalism was) and how CBS handled the aftermath of the controversy as it
focused on the Killian memos. This turned out to be an enormously complicated
story, but it turns out you can get a good grip on it from two books, Rather’s
and Mapes’, and I wouldn’t have gone into all this if the film Truth didn’t seem like it needed some
supplementary research to be able to assess it fairly.
Clearly, to dismiss the film
outright as some CBS notables did last fall—indeed, the CBS network refused to
carry ads for the film—is not quite justified, though as I know, a media firm
will tend to defend its side in a highly pitched controversy “to the death,”
despite what other parties have demonstrated, in court, in books, and otherwise.
##
The “world” of this film seems
both relevant and yet, now, “old-time.” It’s hard to believe it’s 12 years ago
the roots of this story happened. Network news still had the grip on audiences
it did for many of the post–World War II decades, though its market share was
declining; a major news reporter could still act on the idea that investigative
reporting on some major shortcoming in a presidential candidate on a national
news program could affect the presidential election. Consider how Donald Trump
seems to wear his shortcomings, or at least his provocative “ways,” on his
sleeve. Trump’s own status as “fit, by experience, to lead the military as its
civilian commander in chief” (undercut in especially disturbing fashion this
week) makes George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard look almost
like a decorated stint in the Pacific theater during World War II. In fact,
even an endorsement of Trump by Dick Cheney doesn’t sink him, though you could
imagine this would have been the kiss of death for a Republican presidential
candidate in the 2012 or 2008 elections.
For those too young to know much (or care), network-TV news
used to be a major “campfire” around which the American middle class gathered
to both be informed on major news of the day and adjust their opinions to what
seemed right (or reasonable) to think about things. Famously, it was TV news
that showed what the media could do—and what obstacles the Pentagon could be up
against, public-relations-wise—if TV news crews could cover a war (like
Vietnam) out in the grimy field and show it going badly for the U.S. It was in
this context that the likes of Morley Safer, Dan Rather, and various print
journalists (e.g., David Halberstam or the more memoir-oriented Michael Herr,
who died recently) who later became Grand Old Men of the profession first cut
their teeth. Whatever these journalists had done before the war to earn their
early stripes, Vietnam
really sealed them as battle-tested journalists. Watergate only added (over two
fascinating years) to their experience and, as the public trusted them, to their
credibility as national leaders of a sort.
##
The anchorman was a feature of TV news that existed in some
form when TV news first started, by the early 1950s, with the likes of CBS’s
Douglas Edwards. But it was Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) on CBS (and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC [see here]) who first defined the role, again starting
during the Vietnam era. It’s remarkable to think that when Cronkite first
started doing a nightly report as an anchor, the national TV news was only 15
minutes long. It was a bit of a big deal when it expanded to half an hour.
Cronkite’s tenure as anchorman ran from 1962 until 1981. In
the latter year, he retired because he was about retirement age for CBS
workers. Cronkite, who lived almost 30 years after this, has long been lionized
as some kind of magisterial and exemplary figure in network TV news; and modern
journalism students can choose to regard him as glowingly as they will. But for
TV anchors as for so many others, a good reputation comes with time, and it
helps that people forget flaws and other down-sides. By about 1971, Cronkite
was still known enough among conservatives as a mouthpiece for the “liberal
media” that the fictional Archie Bunker on All
in the Family (also a CBS program) would show his crabby-conservative
stripes and trigger laughs (however angled in the audience) by giving a
“raspberry” to Cronkite when he was on.
If one were to write a mildly satirical history of TV news
(say, if one were from a Far East country coming to grips with the wondrous if
puzzling features of U.S. culture), one would say: “Well, you have a
Jewish-owned TV network, with head offices in New York City [William S. Paley (1901-90), famously, was the owner of CBS who
first developed it as a major network up through the early 1980s]; and to get the
consuming public to trust your national news, you get some Scandinavian or
inoffensively Germanic type, or some kind of relatable WASP type or a
Midwestern type, whom the average middle-class viewers across the country would
trust as if he was as right as rain. Then you pursue a liberal agenda in how
you tend to report on things, without making this look obvious.” Cronkite came
of age as an anchorman when this sort of thing was ongoing (and not really objected
to) in the early decades of TV news. (A more-local correlate was Jim Jensen, the anchorman at the flagship station of WCBS-TV
in New York, who worked as an anchorman there from about 1965 to about 1994, after
some earlier issues [including apparent comportment among fellow reporters and,
as I recall, in his rare instances of troubled demeanor when anchoring]
concerning substance abuse he had suffered for years.)
Dan Rather was Cronkite’s successor as TV anchor, and would
be the long-serving anchorman CBS News ever had, 24 years, from 1981 through
spring 2005. (Cronkite served for 19 years.) It seems that Cronkite—who first
helped Rather get some standing as when Rather reported on a hurricane in Texas
and/or on the JFK assassination—later had harbored some mixed feelings about
Rather. Rather in his 2012 book talks about someone who had first been his
supervisor back in the 1960s speaking ill of him in (I believe) the 2004-05
period when Rather’s stock was falling precipitously, and I could well understand
Rather’s pain at this.
Rather had some quirks (sometimes stumbling in his verbal
delivery, for which he supposedly was given some coaching) and some passing,
minor career missteps or quirky episodes, which were publicly noted, among them:
* the “Courage!” signoff to some of his broadcasts (in the
1990s?) (this is actually playfully referenced in the Truth film);
* the “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” odd encounter (in the
1990s?) with an eccentric on the street (Mapes [p. 223] says this eccentric
eventually killed someone);
* his jousting with Nixon in about 1973 when Nixon asked,
“Are you running for something, Mr. Rather?” and Rather answered, “No, sir. Are
you?” (Rather recounts this in his memoir, p. 148);
* his tussle with George H.W. Bush regarding the Iran-contra
scandal in an early 1988 (I believe that’s the time) TV interview that seemed
to make Rather look bad more than it did Bush; Rather’s walking off the set
when a sports event ran late, and the screen was dark for about six minutes).
But Rather must have served CBS well, for he held his
position for 24 years. He was enough part of the culture that even someone like
me, who was less than 10 years old in the 1960s, could remember his name as
when the CBS news used to list, in screen titles, which reporters were
reporting from where and their names were spoken (I recall an announcer
intoning, during the initial “credits,” something like “Dan Rather, reporting
from Saigon”)—and one of my few memories of my father’s jokes about items or
figures from popular culture was his remark about “Rather Dan,” just a play on
the name and nothing more. Rather was famously part of the 60 Minutes crew when that show built its reputation in the 1970s.
In general, Rather was a famous figure in U.S. culture,
for news junkies and anyone else who had even mild knowledge of the American
news/political scene. If Cronkite didn’t develop a reputation as “Uncle
Walter,” a grand old figure who radiated splendid trustworthiness, Dan Rather
would be the main face of CBS News, for the period (as it turned out) that
bridged the post-Vietnam era through the end of the Cold War and up through
“Y2K,” “9/11,” and the Iraq war of 2003 and after.
After Rather left the news division in 2005, there was a bit
of a managerial struggle to replace him, and beef up ratings to boot. Katie
Couric was brought in in 2006, and lasted about five years; with her, it was
attempted to give a softer face to CBS News (someone, maybe CBS News exec Jeff
Fager, remarked that he wanted to get rid of the “voice of God” aspect to
anchoring the news that he implied was an off-putting flavor to Rather’s
approach). Well, CBS got rid of the voice of God, and replaced it with a
woman’s touch that, however hard Katie tried, came out seeming wimpy and not up
to what was needed for such news.
The next anchor to last several years, and still in the
seat, is Scott Pelley (who Rather said [memoir, p. 291] had worked with and for him), who has a Rather-like burden in both anchoring the
nightly news and doing other assignments, such as pieces on 60 Minutes—a sideline that Rather was
fulfilling when he had his fatal step that occasions the film Truth. To me, Pelley resembles no one among
CBS anchors so much as Dan Rather—with the squarish head, the generous,
sonorous bearing—but with a softened tone. It would seem CBS knew it had a good
thing with Rather, so it brought on a “nicer” one for today’s younger
audiences, in the form of Pelley. (Rather also commends Fager for continuing to
uphold the core values of CBS News [p. 291].)
(Humorous sidebar: Another
anchorman’s missteps. The role of the anchorperson, which today’s
smartphone-centered millennials might find quaint, is still a solid “staple” of
American life. [Tongue in cheek here.] One can imagine Brian Williams, after
his stepping down as anchor of NBC in 2015 following an infraction that was in
some ways worse than the problem of the 2004 Mapes report, sitting at home,
wimpering: “What am I going to do now? I have this fund of a gravitas-exuding
voice, a senatorial bearing—and nice power suits! I can’t just speak that way
and wear those suits if I worked at Kinko’s!” “No,” his wife says with quiet,
patient dryness, “you can’t.” As it happens, Williams has another on-camera
role in the NBC fold. [And, seriously: As a measure of the opprobrium Williams
was subjected to when this issue was out in 2015, for one of many examples, The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s main
newspaper, had an article in its February 6, 2015, issue, “Vets rip Williams
over ‘reprehensible’ war story”; this included a quote from the American
Legion: “As an organization of American veterans, the American Legion finds
this type of behavior [Williams’ having claimed to be subjected to combat
danger during the 2003 phase of the Iraq war to which he really hadn’t] to be
reprehensible, and we hope that Mr. Williams will redeem himself.” (p. 1)])
##
If you appreciate all this cultural history, you can
understand how Truth—which is, for
its story, focused mainly on Mary Mapes, the producer behind the Bush/Guard
story—pretty much features Rather as a sort of side figure, and yet assumed as “a
trusted, respectable figure.” Even Robert Redford in portraying him—Redford is
in the shadows here, unlike his more central role in All the President’s Men—makes him seem like an old warhorse, with
nothing left to prove, walking around his privileged environs as if among his
main daily ambitions these days is a good bowel movement, and occasionally sporting
a substantial drink in hand. (Redford’s Rather is like an old Pontiac GTO—he
still runs as he always did, except he requires repeated topping-off infusions
of oil—in this case, apparently labeled with the name “Dewar’s.”)
Some snarky, younger types might scorn how Rather is
presented here as if he is an Abe Lincoln, “assumed as respectable and quietly wonderful,”
while the character lined up to go through a painful, wracking odyssey is his
female key-support, Mary Mapes. I think Rather was depicted this way because
the film knew its audience would basically be people who either (1) are
journalists or enthusiasts about same, who don’t care to debate the ins and
outs of Rather as a person or professional, or (2) those who grew up on the
Rather news who know CBS by him more than by old Uncle Walter. If this strikes
millennials as too square, that’s the way it goes (to adapt the old sign-off
line Cronkite used).
But the way Cate Blanchett tries to bring Mary Mapes to life
as the dynamo behind this story, in the process showing a minor tragedy of a
serious female professional laid low by high-stakes office politics, is what is
really of interest here, and hence viewers can just look at Rather as a sort of
“female better half in the background” while the “male hero” of Mapes does all
the story heavy-lifting.
##
