WASHINGTON -- Watching NBC's relentless retrospective on the career of retiring anchorman Tom Brokaw last week, I couldn't help fantasizing about how CBS would treat the departure next March of Dan Rather from its evening news broadcast.

		Michael McGough is an editor at large in the PG's National Bureau (mmcgough@ nationalpress.com).

As NBC did with Brokaw, CBS will certainly splice together great moments from Rather's career, but even that will prove a trickier task for hagiographers than the Brokaw tribute. For example, will the flashbacks include Rather's apology for the discredited story about George W. Bush's National Guard Service? The larger problem for whoever is assigned to reel together Rather's greatest hits is that Dan always has been a more polarizing figure than Brokaw, who even before he wrote "The Greatest Generation" was a calming presence on the tube. Unlike Brokaw, or ABC's Peter Jennings, Rather has been a "hot" presence in a supposedly cool medium.

It isn't just the Texas metaphors on election night or the odd ad-libs ("Courage!"). Although other anchors traveled the world, it is Rather who is remembered as Gunga Dan for his undercover assignment in Afghanistan.

Other anchors offered viewers little civics lessons, but it's Rather we remember for election night exhortations to voters in the West Coast to show up at the polls regardless of what exit polls from the East indicated.

Other anchors were accused by commentators on the left of allying themselves uncritically with President Bush's war on terror. But only Rather, several days after 9/11, could offer up this quote to David Letterman about his willingness to heed Bush's call: "Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where."

A prophetic, if cynical, explanation of that comment was offered by Daniel C. Hallin of the University of California at San Diego in a 1986 essay. "In a way," Hallin wrote, "Dan Rather is as much a politician as Ronald Reagan , not personally but on behalf of his news organization. He goes before the public every day to appeal for 'votes.' "

And just as politicians have often found that it is more effective to wrap oneself in the flag and praise the wisdom of the people than to get involved in controversial political issues, so in recent years has television."

The left-wing critique of network television news is less well known that the right-wing critique. It might come as a surprise to conservative viewers who have forsaken the major networks for Fox News to learn that even before Sept. 11, 2001, Rather, Brokaw and Jennings were derided by "progressives" as uncritically acquiescing in the agenda of successive conservative administrations.

The common ground for critics of the left and right was the centrality of the network news anchorman. At least since the mid-1960s, anchormen have enjoyed cult status. They weren't merely "newsreaders" like their counterparts in Britain; they were also globe-trotting reporters and the "managing editors" of their broadcasts. And, of course, they were TV stars, as marketable in their way as the stars of sitcoms and shoot-'em-ups.

They were also spokesmen -- however self-appointed -- for the American people. It seemed appropriate for Walter Cronkite, the "most trusted man in America," to give voice to his viewers' enthusiasm for the space program or their horror at the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The criticism from commentators like Hallin came when Cronkite's successor Dan Rather used that franchise to editorialize about world events.

Hallin focuses in his 1986 essay on Rather's coverage of the release of American airline passengers held hostage in Beirut in 1985: "Dan Rather closed the live CBS special with his own summation of the event which contrasted 'profiles in cowardice' (the terrorists) and 'profiles in courage' (the Americans). Conservatives lamented television's focus on the hostages, arguing in effect that it made it more difficult for the administration to treat them as expendable. And so it did. But personalizing the hostage crisis in the way television did also fed the conservative rhetoric about the singular evil of terrorism."

The interesting question isn't whether Dan Rather is distrusted more by "progressives" than he is by conservatives, but whether the bully pulpits he and Brokaw and Jennings occupied for so long are still so potent. In a pre-election essay in the Los Angeles Times, media critic David Shaw, noting that viewership of network news programs had declined 49 percent since 1980, lamented that "no newscaster has either the audience or the trust that Cronkite enjoyed."

It appears that bloggers, the proliferation of cable news programs and even the invention of the DVD have done to Dan Rather what Sen. Jesse Helms and Accuracy in Media could not do: weaken his influence relative to other sources of news and opinion.

That is a mixed blessing. Paternalistic as it may have been, the Cronkite paradigm -- avuncular Establishment journalist assuring his mass audience that "that's the way it is" -- has an appeal lacking in today's fragmented TV news universe, which is described this way by Suzzy Roche in her song "Who Cares":

I like to watch TV / Listen to the news... / This guy's saying that guy's an idiot / She's on the right and he's on the left / Everybody's screaming and yelling at / Each other / Calling each other jerks / It's a party.

The shouting at that party will continue to drown out the sober sounds of the network newscasts. As Gunga Dan might say, "Courage!"