TODAY'S TALKER: "Dumbed down... tarted up" Dan Rather's take on CBS News

I doubt Rather meant it as a personal affront to Couric. When we talk about "sexing up" the news it has little if anything to do with who is delivering it. It's more a way of sensationalizing.

I do not watch any of the 'big three' networks for news - other than the occasional severe weather outbreak since I would really like to know if a tornado is bearing down on me.

I do not watch them, for the reasons Mr. Rather stated so eloquently in his offhand comment.

Today's news is not news, except in the most stretched of explanations. How else do you explain the enormous coverage given Paris Hilton's trip to jail?

Go back, if you can, and watch an archived newscast by David Brinkley, Chet Huntley, or Harry Reasoner. Little attention was given to the seamier side of the news, and very little editorializing went on. There were other programs for that. The news was....(gasp!)....the news.

I am not a big Dan Rather fan, but in this case the man is spot on.

I can't talk about US News porogrammes but these kind of comments are routinely made in Britain when an attractive female is recruited to front a serious current affairs show. And yet women like Joan Bakewell, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon, Mariella Frostrup and Kirsty Young have all proved themselves the intellectual equal of their male colleagues (I know what they look like guys, you can go search them but bear in mind Bakewell, Rippon and Ford have been around a long time now)
I guess it proves what I have always said, that intelligence is the most attractive quality in any human.

News on NBC, ABC, and CBS is presented in a manner to maintain the seemingly brief attention spans of its audiences. I wouldn't compare CBS Evening News with Katie Couric to the in-depth reports BBC World News provides its audience in the same amount of time or to PBS's NewsHour, which presents headlines and then covers a few stories in depth.. However, someone who viewed news on one of the three major networks would not end the viewing of a broadcast too uninformed about some of the major events of that particular day.

I believe Dan Rather is completely wrong. CBS was not in first place when he was anchoring. It hadn't been there for quite some time, and his sloppiness in presenting credible news did interfere. I don't watch network news often when it is presented live. I have watched CBS Evening News with Katie Couric online and cannot determine exactly how dumbed-down the news she provides is from the news Dan Rather provided. Perhaps she is failing to make accusations without proof or the sources to back up her claims. He appears to be angry at CBS, who forced him to resign and hired Ms. Couric to take his place. As well, he would not have such biting remarks about her work if she were a man.

In a news program like the one that CBS has, it seems it is covering the news is should. It is focused on things that affect its audience. So its stories are usually about events, apart from Iraq, that occurs within the United States. It seems to be doing very well with that.

Rather must be getting old. Some newscasters and Dan Rather in particular have been getting away with editorial remarks disguised as news. This tijme he was not making the remarks as a reporter but as the jerk he really is. Still it seems a little to harsh to ruin a man over one dumb remark unless he's had one too many.

I grew up in Chicago, remember fondly my mom and dad watching Fahey Flynn and John Daly report the important news around the city, country and world on a daily basis. They were professional news reporters and took their craft seriously. That was a time when Walter Cronkite was king and Dan Rather was just beginning to cut his teeth. Unfortunately, Rather is correct. News programs aren't about reporting any longer, they are about regurgitating the latest fashion trends, celebrity idiocy and any other moronic item that will keep the masses tuned in.

Juicy stories sell, there's no doubt about it- otherwise we wouldn't have the E! channel devoted exclusively to telling us the latest and greatest from La-La Land. Court TV has joined in the crusade to dumb down America by latching on to the latest and greatest story for as long as the public is interested- then running on to the next big story. People, as a whole, don't want to know what is going on in the world today. We have CNN, Fox and other channels devoted exclusively to reporting the news 24 hours a day. If you are interested, tune in. If not, go to the tabloid channels and get your fill of the "National Enquirer news" there.

I believe Rather is touching on a sensitive point for many of the news stations. Point being, most people today can get their news when and where they want it. If you just catch a snippet of a story on the news, chances are you can go to the internet and do a search for more information. The face of reporting the news is changing and the big networks don't like the fact that the number of their viewers is dwindling daily. The next generation of news hungry people have podcasts, phone messages, blackberry's, etc. to deliver the news to them. TV's will become nothing more than a medium to deliver sports, DVD movies or Tivo'd programs of a viewers choice and, believe me, most will not be viewing the network news shows.

I used to go crazy about all the fluff on the news programs, and I'm a borderline obsessive newsie. But I've come to realize that these folks are in an impossible position. Except for the severely twisted types like myself, staight hard news is boring. The people in charge of the TV world genuinly believe in the importance of being a deliveray portal for the news. As viewers were given more and more choices through the magic of cable, ratings for pure news shows declined. Not wanting to see the end of TV as a source for news, the people incharge were faced with one choice. Attract enough viewers to make the news pay. That is why we see wall to wall coverage of Paris Hilton or whatever. The way I see it, they saved TV news from possible extinction. Yeah we hard core newsies have to endure the fluff, but all in all, we're still getting a lot of hard news, just look between the lines.

It has always been taught in journalism schools that you had to find a way to attract your audience. Sensationalizing the news is not new. It has always been there. We learned, or should have learned, early in life, that to get the real news you had to read between the lines. Do away with the fluff. Todays news shows make that so much easier because the fluff content is so much greater. Even the weather is sensationalized today. To get close to the truth today one must rely on researching on the internet and know your sources.

I agree with Rather, but hardly think CBS is alone on this one. If anyone caught the Daily Show the other night, Jon Stewart ran the clip of CNN cutting off Barbara Starr (who was telling the story of Peter Pace's force out as head of the Joint Chiefs) to cut away to Paris Hilton getting in a car to go back to jail. I'm sure CNN wasn't alone on this one. But when crises in Darfur, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others are glossed over or unmentioned to instead run a four part series on the new weight-loss drugs in America (this really did happen recently), I can hardly disagree with the man.

It's not just the news - it's everything on television. I stopped watching over 10 years ago because it was getting too "dumbed down and tarted up". Dan is spot-on. No doubt Chet is rolling in his grave.

RE: Except for the severely twisted types like myself, straight hard news is boring.

Lol Devin! I'm with you too Devin, though I wouldn't consider us twisted for wanting "just the news." I can pick up the gossip elsewhere, like on E!. This move to dumbing down and tarting up our broadcast news sources is indeed widespread, and not isolated to CBS (though I do believe the hiring of Couric was a move to do just that for CBS). No offense to Katie, but this is the route that many respectable news organizations are going these days. Even MSNBC has added an entertainment component to its website, and it's getting more hits to those pages than to its business news.

The struggle right now is whether to go with the populace's general longing for entertainment gossip (and thus, lure viewers), or figure out how to make the "boring stuff," like business and politics and finance, relevant and interesting. I hope that as a group here on Gather we can come up with a way to do that and still keep the integrity of what news should be about.

I am still trying to figure out whether TV News crated the one sentences news items for the audience or for Dan Rather when the moved him to anchor CBS.

I tend to lean to CBS moving to make Dan passable on TV, I think he is the right person to speak to the dumbing down of the news on TV. Since Couric doesn;t project that "tart" image for me, she seems at least a "professional" as Rather ever was, I don't buy the tarting. Though if we use Rather as the baseline a I will go with the "up" part.