How big was Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory?
“She ran away with it like a hobo with a sweet potato pie,” Dan Rather told Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” serving up a goofy Ratherism on cue.
Rather debuts on HDNet this week, launching “Dan Rather Reports” at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
The longtime CBS News anchor, relegated to Comedy Central on Election Night, begins a one-hour weekly collection of documentaries. Lengths will vary, but the network announced Rather will report the news “with integrity, guts, and without the pressures and demands of advertisers and ratings.” The audience is as tiny as the aspirations are huge.
HDNet general manager Phil Garvin, operating out of an old hangar at what used to be Denver’s Stapleton airport, believes Rather will catapult the network into a higher profile. Owner Mark Cuban calls Rather’s hiring “an extraordinary opportunity to report news that is not defined by corporate economics and that takes its cues from the stories themselves, not a pre-conceived structure.”
Launched in 2001 by Cuban and Garvin, HDNet initially specialized in sports, then broadened its scope to movies and concerts. Garvin insists “HD’s greatest value is news events.” The network is available from more than 40 cable operators – but notably, not Comcast.
“This is a start-up operation from a flat ground zero in late July,” Rather said. “It’s exciting, also daunting.
“I knew very little about HDNet before I went to work there. My instructions from Mark Cuban are ‘strive for excellence and be fearless.”‘
Promising he’ll “pull no punches, play no favorites,” Rather said the shows may focus on one subject for an hour or feature two or three different stories within the hour. He also plans “essays,” a sort of reporter’s notebook segment.
Rather and his team recently finished an investigative report in Alaska, slated among the early programs. This is where crisp high-definition shines: “Such spectacular vistas, an essence to the air and atmosphere there that is very difficult to describe. When you see, it’ll knock your socks off.”
At 75, Rather has spent the last 2 1/2 months on the road. Not that he’s complaining. “I’m a happy warrior,” he said. “The least I can do is be a workhorse. I’m not exactly a show horse, I’m more plow horse.”
With Bryant Gumble doing sports on HBO, Ted Koppel producing documentaries for Discovery, and Rather joining HDNet, serious reporting is straying from the traditional broadcast networks. “These are the kinds of things commercial TV networks don’t do anymore,” Rather said, adding that his model is Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now.”
“He did tough stuff. He did it without fear. It’s so difficult to do that now when a news operation is part of an international super-corporate conglomerate.” The corporate co-opting of news is bad for hard-nosed investigative reporting, he said, because it’s “controversy-averse.”
Television increasingly exhibits “the tendency to underestimate the audience, dumb it down, tart it up, sleaze it up … well, there’s a large segment of the public that’s got a gut full of that.”
On HDNet he’ll take the high road. “If you want movie stars or celebrities, people in the studio bloviating ad nauseum, then this is not the place for you.”
Signature stories will be interviews with troops rather than generals; a focus on the squeezing of America’s middle-economic strata (“I don’t like the phrase middle-class”) and politics. His coverage of presidential elections spans six decades, so it was odd to see him cutting up on Comedy Central.
Rather still defends the discredited “60 Minutes” report on George Bush’s Air National Guard service: “The story was accurate,” he said. “It had some tough truths, truths powerful people did not want out.”
He claims he no longer gives it much thought. “People made their judgments a long time ago about that. With a war in Afghanistan and a war in Iraq, a huge and dangerous national deficit, oil and gas dependence, people want reporting about those things.”
He’ll return to the Bush story “if there are any new developments, and I think there will be.” For now, “I’ll live with history’s judgement on that.”
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
