Dan Rather returns to CBS Sunday, but not the era he embodied
Can you name the evening news anchors for the three broadcast networks? (At this late date, can you even name the three broadcast networks?) Answers below.
There was a time when asking that question would have made as much sense as asking who was president. It didn’t matter if you watched the evening news. Those guys, and for the longest time all of them were just that, guys, loomed so large in the culture. A new book, a recent death, and one of those guys briefly returning to his old network on Sunday summon up memories of the era.
The book is Susan Page’s “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters.” Wait, you might say, Walters was a celebrated interviewer; she wasn’t an anchor. In fact, she was. Her being hired for that job in 1976 was the first step toward ending the overwhelming guy-ness of network anchordom. ABC signed her to a fiveyear contract at $1 million a year ($5.39 million in 2024 dollars) to cohost the “ABC Evening News” with Harry Reasoner. This was very big news. It did not work out. Reasoner was, let us say, not especially reasonable; and sitting behind a desk and reading from a teleprompter did not put Walters’s talents to their best use.
Walters’s hiring also altered the financial profile of new anchors. It made plain that they were stars as well as journalists. No one understood that alteration better, or did more to accelerate it, than a former accountant named Richard Leibner. Leibner, who died earlier this month, became the go-to talent agent for network news personnel. His big breakthrough came in 1981, when one of his clients succeeded Walter Cronkite as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” and at an annual salary of $2.2 million. That money was unheard of then for someone in such a job. Notice, too, how much more it was than what Walters got.
That client was Dan Rather. There is much to be said about Rather, both pro and con. Frank Marshall’s 2023 documentary, “Rather,” which starts streaming May 1 on Netflix, is mostly pro. The big news about Rather is that he will be appearing this weekend on “CBS Sunday Morning.” What makes that news big is that he hasn’t appeared on the network since CBS fired him, in 2006.
Rather, 92, has remained active: on social media, writing books and a newspaper column, hosting a radio show on Sirius XM. He’s lasted from the networkanchor era to the reality-TV era. Think of him as the ultimate contestant for what could be a special version of one of CBS’ longest-running shows: “Golden Survivor.”