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Dan Rather’s Second Coming
The Politico Mag Profile



Ben Baker for Politico Magazine
By Michael Kruse
May/June 2017

With millions of Facebook fans and the freedom to speak his mind, the 85-year-old journalist is back in the arena—facing the opponent he’s been waiting for his entire life.

One late morning on a recent rainy Saturday in Austin, Texas, Dan Rather, dressed in a pressed dark suit and a crisp blue shirt, climbed a short flight of stairs up onto a stage. The venue was a hip space called the Belmont, the event was a discussion about the importance of rigorous reporting in the time of President Donald Trump, and the packed-in crowd was stylish, educated and conspicuously young. The introduction of Rather, who is 85, old enough to be a grandfather to most of the people who were present, elicited long, loud applause—noticeably longer and louder than it was for his two accomplished and much younger fellow panelists. Rather adjusted his hearing aids and spoke into a handheld microphone. His answers to questions landed not like the musings of a name from the past but as fire from a battle-tested combatant. He called for laser focus on “what the hell has gone on with the Russians in the election.”

He denounced 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.

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. Last fall, he debuted a weekly SiriusXM radio hour called “Dan Rather’s America,” and he’s a regular with hits on mainstream cable—a bigger platform than he has with AXS TV, for which he did “Dan Rather Reports” from 2006 to 2013 and now hosts “The Big Interview.” But the improbable, white-hot hub of his comeback 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. For decades, Rather was fodder for critics who considered him too emotional, too liberal, too ambitious, too self-serious. He didn’t smile a lot; his folksy sayings could come off as downright weird. But the exact eccentricities that made at times for an awkward fit for network television, and his talent for thoughtful but unambiguous pronouncements of outrage, have been pitch-perfect for this new medium and moment. One of the leading voices of the Trump resistance is not some black-masked radical or a marching young woman with a pink knit hat but a man with gray hair, a name you know and a neatly knotted tie.

“He is the Energizer Bunny. He keeps going and going, and the country is better for it,” Cuban told me. His order to Rather after he hired him: “Go piss people off.”

In his Facebook essays, Rather has called Trump unsettling and unstable and incompetent and erratic and gloating and swaggering and petulant and ill-informed. His tone has grown increasingly alarmed. In January, he wrote of “potential peril.” “This is an emergency,” he warned in February. In March, in the wake of more news concerning Russian interference in the election, he suggested people start praying for the future of the country.

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/26/dan-rather-comeback-facebook-donald-trump-215050