Dan Rather and the Naked Trucker

I wrote a story many years ago equating the cable universe with something huckster P.T. Barnum might have cooked up. This week, the cable networks at TV press tour certainly proved me correct.

There was Mr. T, trotting out the same old shtick he’s used to somehow stay in the media spotlight for the past 25 years. There was KISS’s Gene Simmons, revealing himself for the utterly cynical showman he’s always been (Barnum withers by comparison). There was legendary bad girl (and bad driver) Shannen Doherty, shedding “real� tears and slipping in a mention that her mother was in the room in the bargain. There was Comedy Central’s “Naked Trucker,� who appeared onstage clothed only with a judiciously placed guitar (and, as one critic critically positioned at the press conference noted, a jock strap).

Cable networks veer violently back and forth between trying to amuse their immediate audience, those reporters attending the press conferences, and the readers to whom those journalists ultimately will report. Mr. T probably rose beyond what those assembled thought of him and emerged, phoenix-like, to a new generation of media consumers. “Naked Trucker’s� wit was likely lost on a lot of journalists and, even for those who got or liked the joke, much of it doesn’t really translate into print. Doherty has a select audience; no one else gives a crap, so her melodrama was likely a wash.

The event that had most journalists covering Press Tour talking for days after the event, however, was Dan Rather’s appearance on behalf of Mark Cuban’s HDNet. Though Rather seems to get a little too choked up at his every mention of Edward R. Murrow, whose legacy at this point he decidedly will not usurp, and though Ted Koppel is obviously more respected amongst those covering press tour and is accepting a similar drop in viewers – though Rather’s plunging from the millions to some tens of thousands – dapper Dan’s teary farewell to CBS, to being able to influence, in some small way, a nation – struck many as a poignant, lion-in-winter moment. (Rather himself suggested he was being relegated to a “wilderness.�) For others, it was just weird, a word rarely attached to other news anchors.

For Cuban, Rather’s move is exhilarating; for Rather, it’s the sorry third act to a heretofore triumphal narrative. Hence Rather’s treacle.

(During the press conference, as microphones were being passed from reporter to reporter who jockey mercilessly for position so that they could roundly elucidate their queries, a reporter behind me kept getting shut out – not by other reporters, but by Cuban, persisting in celebratory spin. Now, I utterly admire Cuban – it would be bizarre if he owned an NBA team with any other name but the Mavericks, and he’ll respond to a reporter’s query faster than it takes for anyone else’s publicist to consider asking her superiors whether she can send an email to a colleague inquiring into whether it might be felicitous for someone to respond to a reporter’s query.

But during this press conference, Cuban’s chatter led the woman who gave the mike to the guy who couldn’t get his question asked (ostensibly, she’s an employee of Cuban’s) to exasperatedly declare (albeit sotto voce,) “He talks too much!�)