When Hollywood Reporter quotes Mike Wallace as saying that Dan Rather's depature from CBS was a "sad, bloody story," they had no idea how much metaphoric blood was on Dan's hands, according to The New York Observer:

Peter Boyer, the New Yorker writer and author of the 1989 book Who Killed CBS?, said, “Dan Rather is a creature of a strange, unrealistic, almost surreal arrangement that is so long past, and such an anachronism—which is to say three networks with a captive nationwide audience—that you wonder how he might psychically adapt to being part of the tiniest fraction of the most fragmented form of communication that exists. I don’t know. I guess that’ll be up to Dan and his shrinks in the future.”

Several long-term associates of Mr. Rather searched for the most appropriate analogy. “Is he Burt Lancaster to Tom Brokaw’s Jimmy Stewart?” asked one.

He is William Holden from The Wild Bunch, said another. Or Gary Cooper from High Noon.

“Dan is the lone gunfighter who squints into the sun, sets his horse into the wind and rides off to the next challenge,” said a third. “He’s had all these gun battles in the past, there’s a trail of bodies, but he knows he’s got it in him to rescue the townspeople. It’s just—well, he’s so f***ing alone.”

There’s a trail of bodies--and Dan, "the lone gunfighter" has plugged 'em full of lead during "all these gunbattles"? No wonder "he’s so f***ing alone"--look at his body count!

Geez. I thought violence on television was restricted to prime time--when did anchormen go from being overhyped newsreaders to trigger-happy gunslingers? Given the gunslinging image of the man in the oval office (who also made his mark in Texas before going national), and given what the Azlan/MEChA men think of the 19th century American expansion into the west, is this an anology the left really wants to use to describe one of its favorite television sons?

Update: As we discussed this story over lunch, my wife mentioned the binary world of television journalism--when it's going right, the anchorman is a gunslinging crusader (just to keep the analogies rendered anathema by PC correctness going) but if there's a problem? Well, as Walter Cronkite said last year:

Cronkite did not heavily fault Rather for his role in last September's discredited story about President Bush's military service. Rather anchored the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story.

"We all know he made a mistake by now," Cronkite said. "But would we have done much the same? I would not be sure that I wouldn't have followed my producers and accepted what they had to offer."

Hey, he's just a newsreader--it's the producer who writes the copy!

Which is true, as Tom Wolfe noted in 1980:

Within the television news operations there’s such a premium put on not being a reporter. Everyone aspires to the man who never has to leave the building, the anchor man, who is a performer. The reporters are called researchers and are usually young women, and the correspondent on television is a substar, a supporting actor who prides himself on the fact that he doesn’t have to prepare the story. You talk to these guys and they’ll say, “Well, they sent me from Beirut to Teheran, and I had forty-five minutes to get briefed on the situation.” What they should say is, “I read the AP copy.” The idea is that as a performer you can pull together this news operation anywhere you go and the whole status structure is set up in such a way that you’re not going to get good reporters. Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. I’m sure there have been some. But what story during Watergate? During Watergate there were new stories coming out every day. None were on television, except when television simply broadcast the hearings. The can do a set event. And that’s what television is actually best at. In fact, it’d be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it’s getting news coverage.

Nor would the peers of anchormen think they were the second coming of Jesse James. Besides--I thought Bill Paley cancelled all the westerns in the early 1970s to make CBS more progressive. Maybe Dan the television gunslinger is this is the very Zenith of liberal nostalgia!