Dan Rather loves covering the news. No, Dan Rather is obsessive about covering the news. How do we know? He informs us of that redundantly in his new memoir, a sequel to The Camera Never Blinks, published back in 1977 when he was a mere CBS News correspondent and not yet the inheritor of Walter Cronkite's illustrious anchor chair. In these latest dispatches from the front, we learn: "I have dodged bullets on three continents. I've been maced, mugged, and arrested by the KGB." . . . "I . . . am . . . dedicated to the idea of being there, seeing, hearing, sniffing the story . . . . Every instinct you have tells you to follow the fire trucks." . . . "When I sense a big one brewing, . . . inside me there is this feeling of the caged cat." . . . "I have been described in print as someone with a "never-ending, consuming passion for news: what's news, what's going to be news, what's not news, what could be news, does anyone else have the same news . . . .' That description is deadsolid perfect. I embody allf that and to a fault . . . . [How] tiresome and boring it must be for anyone near me who doesn't share this addiction."

In the present volume, Rather documents how he has fed that addiction since his earlier jottings. (A 1991 offering, I Remember, was mostly about his dirt-poor upbringing in Texas; The Camera Never Blinks Twice went to press before his recent sortie to Haiti, where he scored exclusive interviews with General Raoul Cedras -- and we'll doubtless hear about that in The Camera Never Blinks Thrice.) Here, we travel with him every agonizing step of the way in his famous 1980 anabasis into Afghanistan, swathed in native dress and dubbed by the irreverent "Gunga Dan." And again: Rather in Tiananmen Square for the civil unrest of 1989; in the Soviet Union and at the Berlin Wall as communism crumbled; in Cuba for some jawboning with Fidel Castro; being roused unceremoniously from his Baghdad hotel and driven by armed guards to a midnight interview with Saddam Hussein; battling restrictions on press coverage of the Persian Gulf war; broadcasting live from the Mogadishu airport as marines stormed ashore (in the glare ofV cameras) in Somalia; returning to Vietnam last year with General Norman Schwarzkopf to assess the post-war changes. (". . . I stand atop the Majestic Hotel [in Ho Chi Minh City] and weep. Alone. Weep for the dead . . . . And for all the memories.")

Along the way in this bumptious chronicle, Rather takes a few entertaining sidetrips: jousting with George Bush during the 1988 campaign over how much the then vice president knew about the Iran arms-for-hostages deal; angrily departing his anchor chair -- and leaving CBS screens dark nationwide for six minutes -- to protest the network's decision to stick with a women's U.S. Open tennis semi-final between Steffi Graf and Lori McNeil, instead of switching to coverage of Pope John Paul II's arrival in Miami. ("Outrageous," fumes Rather. Four years later, CBS was the only network to preempt one of the presidential debates between Bush and Bill Clinton. "We were committed to the baseball playoffs," he laments. "The trend is worrisome.")

One of the volume's most engaging yarns is a flashback to President Nixon's 1972 trip to Yugoslavia when Rather was White House correspondent. Up to that time, he'd never missed a press plane, he boasts, "even in the days when I stayed out all night and drank too much soda pop." One late night in Belgrade, however, he imbibed quantities of "'paint thinner' . . . a distinctly lethal kind of fresh-brewed Slavic" spirits (come on, Dan, that's called moonshine where you come from) and consequently overslept, thus being stranded alone and without his passport. His frantic, terror-stricken efforts to catch up with the presidential party dramatize definitively, and ainusingly, the perils of attempting to combine good times with good reporting.

But Dan Rather's finest moment came not on the journalistic hustings but at a lectern in Miami in September 1993, when he addressed the national convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association. It was a speech cast from the matrix of Edward R. Murrow's legendary 1958 address to the same group. "How goes the battle for quality, for truth and justice" in broadcast news since Murrow delivered his indictment, Rather asked. "Not very well."

A few arrows from his quiver:

We have allowed this great instrument . . . to be squandered and cheapened . . . . [The] best among us hang their heads in embarrassment, even shame . . . ashamed of the many things we have allowed our craft, our profession, our life's work to become . . . . [For too long we have answered to lhe worst, not to the best, within ourselves and within our audience.

They've got us putting more fuzz and wuzz on the air, cop-shop stuff, so as to compete not with other news programs but with entertainment programs (including those posing as news programs) for dead bodies, mayhem, and lurid tales . . . . Thoughtfully written analysis is out . . . . Hire lookers, not writers. Do powder-puff, not probing, interviews . . . . Make nice, not news . . . . A climate of fear, at all levels, has been created, without a fight. We -- you and I i have allowed them to do it, and even helped them to do it.

We've all gone Hollywood -- we've all succumbed to the Hollywoodization of the news -- because we were afraid not to . . . . We put videotape through a Cuisinart trying to come up with highspeed, MTV-style cross-cuts . . . . We give the best slots to gossip and prurience . . . . We have gone so far down the Infotainment trail that we'll be a long time getting back to where we started -- if ever.

Fight back, he advised his audience of TV journalists. Make a little noise. Fight the fear that leads to "showbizification." Produce local versions of Nightline and Sunday Morning. Be confident that people will watch serious news programs that are well written and well produced. Avoid market researchers. Prove that electronic news is not "doomed to be completely and forever overwhelmed by commercialism and entertainment values."

A few critics argued at the time that Rather's diatribe was a wee bit overwrought. Perhaps. But it came from a newsman who has spent his life in the joumalistic trenches, who wears his passion for the news unabashedly on his sleeve like a Boy Scout merit badge, who has taken the risks and earned his right to those views q perhaps more so than any other "star" TV news figure now on the scene. Being a television newsperson (much less an anchor man), says Rather, "is an incredibly vain, self-centered, and egocentric line of work." The Camera Never Blinks Twice (and its predecessor) may document the truth of that remark, but it also provides an endearing and useful record of a life in the super-fast journalistic lane by one of the game's most fervid and capable practitioners.

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