Media Geezer Alert

If the press reports are correct, CBS News Anchorman Dan Rather, 70, has all but inked a contract extension that will keep him at the network through 2006. This is the broadcast journalism equivalent of failing ever onward and upward.

When Rather took over the CBS Evening News slot from Walter Cronkite (who retired, if one need edit, at the age of 65), the program was the highest-rated and most prestigious news broadcast in America. It is now a third-place laggard of dubious journalistic content. Ordinarily, someone who (as "managing editor") had overseen such a decline would have been thrown overboard years ago.

Au contraire. They're throwing yet more millions at him for another four years.