"Courage" no more: Dan Rather debuts a new sign-off for his online newscast

"Stay steady." That's how Dan Rather ended the first installment of his new online news newscast for The Young Turks Network, The News with Dan Rather. They're appropriate words in these turbulent times, made all the more powerful coming from a man with a history of drawing attention for his sign-offs.

Back in September 1986, Rather -- then anchor of the CBS Evening News -- made headlines when he began ending his newscast with a one-word salutation: "Courage." Conceived by Rather as a sign-off in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow's "Good night and good luck" and Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is," in an interview with the LA Times at the time he cautioned against over-analyzing his use of the word. "I've been using it as a greeting or salutation for at least 15 or 20 years," he told the Times, "and I sometimes used it in the '70s to end my radio broadcasts. I like the word; what can I say?"

The sign-off was short-lived. Met with derision by news industry insiders and mocked by the NY tabloids, after just five broadcasts (in one he said "Coraje," the Spanish word for courage), Rather stopped using the sign-off. He did, however, bring it back one last time on March 9, 2005, his last day as anchor of the CBS Evening News.

If you think all of this might have left the newsman a bit gun-shy when it comes to introducing signature sign-offs, think again. Enjoying an unlikely second act as one of the leading voices of the Trump resistance (he has over two million Facebook followers), at this stage of career the 86 year-old Rather does what he wants. (Name another veteran journalist anchoring an online newscast from his home office.)

So why "Stay Steady"? It seems to be one of Rather's favorite phrases -- he uses it frequently -- and he even dedicates a chapter to it in his latest book, What Unites Us. (True story: the chapter it precedes is titled "Courage.")

In What Unites Us, Rather explains that "steady" was a favorite word of his father's and one that he associates with his hero Edward R Murrow, whom he remembers using it in a report from the frontlines of WWII. He recalls repeating it to himself when he heard President Kennedy was shot and in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 when "I felt anxiety closing in, when my heartbeat quickened and my world began to wobble."