Sepideh Saremi

Dan Rather is suing CBS.

After he was fired, I went to a talk given by him at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Before the audience got seated, ushers provided note cards for questions. Mine was something like, “You’ve been a journalist for a long time: How do you think blogging is changing journalism today?” A pointed question, to be sure, considering that he’d just been fired because of bloggers, but I had completely forgotten about that fracas as I scribbled the question down on my index card. My intentions were pure. I really wanted to know.

My question got picked, and if I recall correctly, I think I was the only person under the age of 30 to get the mic and one of very few people not asking questions about Bush. When I started asking the question, there was a bright spotlight on me. A photographer was rapidly snapping my picture. Dan Rather was ten feet away and smiling at me. For three seconds, I even thought he was kind of foxy, for a man of a certain age at least. I asked my question and right at the end I suddenly remembered the whole blogger incident. Oops, I thought, oh crap. I thought, now he will find out who I am and I’ll be blacklisted from journalism forever. Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer are going to TP my house. Peter Jennings will make fun of me on live TV. Walter Cronkite will shoot me in the face. I felt like I’d disrespected not just a man, but an Institution. I thought, oh man, he is going to kill me with verbal ninja moves in his answer. I wanted to run away, but I was standing in that spotlight, I had to finish asking the question. And he did not kill me verbally. He just sighed and said that he is not a big fan of blogs. Not an objective answer, to be sure, but that’s life.

So even though I am a big fan of blogs, my worship of old-school journalism makes me wish him much luck with his lawsuit. He seems like a nice man, a journalist who made a human mistake.