NEW YORK (AP) – As his final evening newscast approaches on Wednesday, Dan Rather is seeing the indignities pile up as quickly as the roses that were tossed in the path of Tom Brokaw when the NBC anchorman stepped down late last year.

The latest came in a New Yorker magazine article, where fellow CBS News legends Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace talked about how difficult it was to watch Rather as an anchor.

The New Yorker article, published last week, generated some public sympathy for Rather because of Cronkite and Wallace’s comments. Cronkite, his immediate predecessor as anchor, said he often watched Brokaw and that it appeared to some viewers that Rather was playing the role of a newsman.

Wallace said Rather is “not as easy to watch as (ABC’s Peter) Jennings or Brokaw.” Their remarks made headlines.

“I felt he was more fully himself than any of the other anchors, more fully a journalist,” said Alex Jones, director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy. “You might not like it or like him, but he was who he was. He was a guy from Texas. He was a guy with a pugnacious streak. He was very ambitious and he put himself in a position to do some reporting.”

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