Dan Rather, in speaking recently of his departure as the anchor for CBS News, said the shakeup at his network will never alter his view of that once-lordly operation and his lofty place in it for nearly 25 years.

“Those of us that work here – and nobody more than myself – believe that CBS News is this mystical kingdom of journalistic knights,” he told The New York Times. “Now, that may not be true. But the fact that we believe it to our marrow is very real to us.”

Mark Kelley, an assistant professor of communications and journalism at the University of Maine, witnessed firsthand Rather’s grandiloquent opinion of his position in the small pantheon of network news anchors.

Before earning his doctorate and becoming a teacher, Kelley had spent more than 20 years in the TV news business, first in Syracuse, N.Y., and later as the anchor for WNDU in South Bend, Ind., an NBC affiliate. In 1988, as part of a news team following the Indiana delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Kelley met Rather – but only in passing, you might say, and gruffly at that.

Kelley was in line, waiting for his press credentials, when he heard a voice nearby blustering, “Excuse me, excuse me. Going live! Going live!” Naturally, Kelley thought there must have been some earth-shattering development in the works, but it turned out to be nothing more than Rather, with his entourage, asserting his position as the most important newsman at the convention.

“A guy with a walkie-talkie blows by and shoulders me out of the way,” Kelley recalled with a laugh on Monday, “and in his wake, a hand grasps my left shoulder and shoves me out of the way. That was Dan Rather.”

Nowadays, it’s getting awfully lonely at the top.

Rather’s still-speculative decision to vacate his anchor throne, and Tom Brokaw’s elaborately choreographed departure as NBC anchorman, leave only ABC’s Peter Jennings to carry the network news torch, whose flame has been growing ever weaker with the profusion of 24-hour cable news outlets and Internet-related sources of information. Kelley believes the steady erosion of power in network news and the faces that symbolized them can be traced to a wealthy, brash upstart named Ted Turner.

“When he started CNN in the late 1970s, people laughed at Turner and called him crazy,” Kelley said. “They said, ‘Who’s going to watch cable news when there are these giants on the screen every night?’ Eventually, of course, there were lots of other cable outlets and they all contributed to the loss of network dominance of the news.”

While CNN struggled early to gain viewers and credibility in the shadow of the big-three national news icons, it was the first Gulf War that established cable news’ position as a valid competitor to be reckoned with.

“All of a sudden, high-ranking officials started citing CNN stories,” Kelley said. “CNN was always there when you wanted news. It was a force, and that’s when the networks really started losing ground.”

Kelley said the possible choices for successors to the elite anchor spots – John Roberts for Rather, Brian Williams for Brokaw – may be an indication that the networks have already conceded their diminished stature in America’s living rooms.

“It used to be that a candidate for the anchor position had to have covered a war – all of the old ones did,” Kelley said. “And you had to be the network’s chief White House correspondent before they’d take you seriously and pop you into that chair. I think NBC, at least, has thrown that old anchor model out the window with Brian Williams. He’s young, hip, with nice hair, but he doesn’t have the old-world credentials.”

If CBS and NBC already seem to be facing the inevitable – that the traditional old network format is a dinosaur doomed for extinction – ABC appears to be placing its bets for the future on Jennings, the last guy standing, and a resurgent “ABC World News Tonight.”

“He’s the youngest of the old three,” Kelley said. “But if he doesn’t bring up the ratings, maybe he’s gone, too. About 60 percent of the viewers of the nightly network news are older, the Polident crowd. But it’s a loyal following, so I think all the networks will let their old news formats run their course, until the Greatest Generation dies off. Then, if they can’t make it against Fox News and others, they’ll have to ask the hard question.”

The hard question, Kelley said, is whether to even continue the nightly news broadcasts or replace them with more profitable, non-news programming.

“The nightly news, from 6:30 p.m. to 7, is a product,” he said. “And if that half-hour product can’t deliver the numbers that everyone is happy with, the networks will have to start conceding that cable has finally beat us, after all, so let’s give it up.”

Yet Kelley believes that the loss of the familiar network figureheads to the emerging domination of cable could have its downside, too.

“The networks, from the beginning, always had sort of a contract with the public,” he said. “You give us 30 minutes of your time, it said, and we’ll deliver the most important information of the day for you to use as you see fit. When you go to news on demand, where people seek only the information they’re interested in or what fits their agenda, I think you will have lost something. Without the nightly news habit, many people may start to feel they’re too busy to even bother searching for the news they need to stay informed.”

Back when Walter Cronkite enjoyed his long reputation as the most trusted man in America, he signed off each night with the now-legendary phrase: “And that’s the way it is.”

Well, for good or bad, that’s certainly not the way it is any longer.

So stay tuned, folks. There’s more of this story to come.