The CBS Memo Controversy of September 2004
and other examples of media bias in John Kerry's favor

(Updated 10/05/2004 to change some of the commentary to past tense.)

This is a discussion of a series of apparently forged memos, defended by CBS and Dan Rather, which were supposed to prove a point helpful to the [2004] John Kerry presidential campaign.  But the memos have been judged by several experts to be forgeries.  The author of one of the memos is no longer living, but his son has expressed his doubts about the memo's authenticity.

Dan Rather wants everyone to ignore the idea that the evidence was manufactured to suit the story, and concentrate on the main point of it all, which was that young George W. Bush, many years ago, was not exactly fastidious about completing his obligations with the National Guard.  But this story comes up every time Mr. Bush runs for any office, and it never sticks, because there's nothing to it.  His Honorable Discharge is all the documentation he needs.

Sometimes overzealous reporters don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

At the core of the current controversy is the fact that someone apparently cooked up a memo, trying to make it look as if it had been written in 1973 on an office typewriter.  But the memo appears to have been written with Microsoft Word, in the Times New Roman font, with proportional spacing, and it includes at least one character that was not found on ordinary office typewriters in 1973.  Certainly not a typewriter that was likely to have been in the offices of the Texas National Guard back then.  There has been some speculation that the author of the forgery is "someone younger than 30, who has no sense of history, assumes computers have existed forever, and has never seen an IBM Selectric typewriter."  (Or any typewriter!)  But it could also have been a remarkably ignorant and careless older adult.

All this would have been no big deal, except that Dan Rather and CBS continued to stand by the memos as authentic, long after most people stopped believing him, hoping, apparently, that it would help the John Kerry campaign.  When people complain about media bias, it is because of incidents like this!

There is a lot to be learned from this incident.

If this CBS news story can be proven to be maliciously false, misleading and deceptive, then you have to wonder... what other stories have they embellished?  What else are they lying about?  And if you hear important news stories from other sources, and notice that CBS [or MSNBC or CNN or ABC] has ignored them, you have to wonder... what else are they hiding?

There may be a positive outcome from all this, if the current CBS scandal convinces a lot of people to look elsewhere for daily news.  The internet is full of news sources that are much more accurate and reliable than CBS or any other TV network (with the possible exception of the Fox News Channel).

Note:  Another nearby page has more material about Dan Rather himself — including new information about his lawsuit against CBS.



Sidebar discussion about TV news in general, soon to become a page of its own:

People who have fast and reliable internet service don't need a television at all!  You can go to the internet 24/7 and get the headlines, or the details on a specific story, without waiting for a scheduled news show.  Sometimes I hear others say that they only keep the TV around to watch the evening news, because everything else on the air is either insipid or filthy.  But the "news" is potentially the most damaging material on the air.

For example, one particularly interesting news blog is World Mag Blog, and an example of a really good bloggish news page is Lucianne.

When you watch television, you only see what the producers want you to see, and you only get information at the rate they send it, which means that you have to watch three minute clusters of commercials alternating with three-minute news segments.  Even then, the news is dumbed-down, edited, biased in favor of the political left, and timed to bring about a desired (political) result or an emotional response.  TV news writers appear to make a conscious effort to reduce every story to one- and two-syllable words whenever possible.  (Or it could be that they're just so poorly educated that they have small vocabularies.)  The producers of local TV newscasts will do whatever it takes to get you to tune in and stay there, or at least tell the Nielsen people that you did.

You see, the ultimate purpose of the news media is not necessarily to deliver the news, to keep you informed, to tell the whole story, or to tell the whole truth about any current event.  The over-commercialized news media must deliver an audience to a series of advertisers.  In particular, advertisers prefer an audience made up of people who are likely to spend money with very little encouragement, which means people who make decisions based on emotions rather than logic, which in turn means (primarily) women between the ages of 18 and 34.  To attract such an audience, the news media attempt to induce some kind of emotional reaction from everyone watching (listening, reading).  Emotionally appealing TV programs (news, game show, Hollywood gossip show or soap opera) are designed to compel certain weak-willed individuals to tune in again the next day.  (And yes, the producers of these shows are the same people who say they're outraged about the tobacco companies marketing products that are known to be addictive!)  Beware of this if you get news and information from print or broadcast media, or from the internet.  You must always remain skeptical.  The mainstream news media have set traps, and it's up to you to avoid them.



Recap and overview articles:


Rathergate redux at the NYT?  Some readers may remember Ben Barnes from another conspiracy theory:  the Texas Air National Guard (TANG) story that blew up in the faces of CBS News execs in late 2004.  Barnes had come forward to tell CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday that he had arranged for George W. Bush to get into the TANG by jumping him over the waiting list so that then-President Bush could avoid service in Vietnam, even though (a) Barnes was a Democrat and not a Bush ally, and (b) Barnes later claimed no one in the Bush family asked him to do it.  The Thornbugh-Baccardi report that CBS commissioned on Rathergate delves into this in great detail, including the fact that CBS producer Mary Mapes had heard from several other sources that this was almost certainly false, a fact she kept from CBS News management. [...] And while we're at it, (c) — Barnes was one of the biggest fundraisers in the 2004 cycle for the DNC and John Kerry, a point that CBS failed to report even though they knew it while using him as their main source for that claim.

Why it's important to remember Rathergate.  On September 8, 2004, CBS's "60 Minutes" used forged government documents as the basis for a story that attacked the military record of then-President George W. Bush.  It was bad enough that CBS used forged government documents, but what made it worse was that CBS aired this story during the presidential election and timed the airing to coincide with the rollout of Democrat John Kerry's "favorite son" campaign theme.  CBS thus provided the "news" upon which the Democrat candidate based his attack ads.  The CBS story was quickly disproven and eventually forced CBS into personnel changes and investigations.  Dan Rather was forced into retirement a few months later.  But CBS did not give up before a lengthy battle in which bloggers demonstrated that the font and other features in the forged documents did not exist in 1972 (the date placed on the forgeries).  The battle over the truth became a story in itself.  The truth about the font spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and the internet, quickly picking up steam.  CBS, Rather and the left clung to their story as long as they could.  They even invented the "fake but accurate" standard to defend the forged documents.  CBS and its surrogates belittled the bloggers but ended up making them famous.  Conservative bloggers would embrace the "pajamas" epithet thrown at them during the battle — some of whom still use it today.  With persistence, they established that CBS was wrong.  The documents were forgeries, and CBS personnel committed misconduct in airing the story.  Investigations and lawsuits and an independent panel followed.  The result was a victory for the truth and a blow to the establishment media.  CBS was proven to have lied to influence a presidential election.  Its lie was discovered and exposed very publicly over two weeks.

ViacomCBS is Meddling in the Presidential Election.  [Scroll down]  Back in 2004, CBS News attempted to defeat George W. Bush's run for re-election against John Kerry.  It had a second 60 Minutes program at the time, hosted by Dan Rather, and it manufactured a story full of lies, fake documents, and dishonestly edited interviews to make it appear as though Bush had used political influence to get in the Texas Air National Guard and avoid going to Vietnam.  A disgraced Dan Rather ended up having to give up his position as anchor of the CBS Evening News and leaving the network, along with his producers.  He sued CBS and Viacom for $70 million, and after several years, the case was thrown out.  He tried unsuccessfully to get it reinstated.  In 2015, a movie ironically called Truth attempted to rehabilitate Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes.  But even with Robert Redford playing Rather, the movie bombed, grossing just $2.5 million in the U.S.

Fake News: Two Case Studies.  My first case study is the episode known as Rathergate.  It represents one of the great journalistic frauds of our time.  It is a case study in the fabrication of fake news and partisan bias. [...] The segment was produced and written by Mary Mapes.  In researching the story, Mapes had interviewed witnesses with firsthand knowledge of the Texas Air National Guard's personnel needs.  She was told that they needed pilots at the time and that no influence would have been necessary to secure Bush's admission.  The documents on which Rather based the second segment proved to be fabricated on Microsoft Word in the computer era, not typewritten in the early 1970s by Bush's commanding officer or anyone else.  The content and format of the documents also betrayed their fabrication.  The story began to fall apart within a few hours of its broadcast.

Enemies of the People?  The modern era of fake news began with George W. Bush's election in 2000.  In September 2004, less than two months before the Bush-Kerry election, the high priest of fake news — Cronkite's successor, Dan Rather — aired a 60 Minutes report which contended that President Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard because of political influence and that his officer evaluation reports gave him high marks despite his shirking of his duty.  This was an obvious attempt to damage Bush's candidacy and interfere in the election.  Within hours of the report, it became entirely clear that Rather's report was based entirely on forged documents.  CBS and Rather later issued a half-apology.  Such "reports," attempting interference in elections, has become the norm for the American media and most of the world's.

Rather Shameful.  When CBS's 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast its lead story — reported by Dan Rather and produced by Mary Mapes — on the evening of September 8, 2004, it was given the anodyne title "For the Record," as though it constituted little more than a disinterested historical footnote.  In reality, the story was a bold fabrication about President George W. Bush's long-ago service in the Texas National Guard, intended to damage him in his campaign for reelection against John Kerry.  Within hours of the broadcast, after CBS News posted online PDF copies of four memos highlighted in the segment, the story began to fall apart.  The memos looked phony.  By the following evening, CBS was in crisis mode trying to deal with the mess.  As other news outlets followed up, the story continued to disintegrate.  CBS nevertheless hung with it for nearly two weeks.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#10] Rathergate (or Memogate):  In an effort to damage George W. Bush's 2004 run for reelection, Dan Rather — whose bias goes back decades — floated a story based on forged documents that claimed Bush had gone AWOL from his Texas Air National Guard unit back in 1973.  Internet sleuths, though, realized that the documents purporting to have been created on a 1970s era typewriter were actually made using a Microsoft computer font and obviously these computers did not exist in 1973.  Rather refused to admit the truth, however, and ultimate lost his spot as the anchor of CBS's nightly newscast.  This takedown of a network news anchor put the Internet on the map as a force to be reckoned with.


Timely news and commentary:


Our Lying Idiot Media Really Is That Dumb.  The media complains that no one trusts its authority or respects its hard work.  What authority and what hard work?  The current dean of traditional journalism is Dan Rather: a hack who took part in an attempt to torpedo George W. Bush's reelection campaign with Vietnam War documents produced in Microsoft Word.  And his younger peers make him look good.  It's not just that the media lies all the time in the service of its cause, but that its wretches no longer have the skill or even understanding to tell the lies apart from the truth.  And so they simplify matters in the timeless fashion of extremists by declaring everything they believe to be the truth and everything that they disagree with to be a lie.  Or disinformation.

Dan Rather:  CNN's 'Reliable Source'.  Dan Rather, the former CBS Evening News host forced out in 2005 following one of the most infamous journalistic failures this century, is nevertheless a frequent guest on the CNN media show Reliable Sources.  With host Brian Stelter often introducing him as "legendary," Rather has had a consistent platform to peddle folksy, platitudinous takes on the news and journalism.  "It's becoming increasingly apparent that truth is closing in.  Truth does matter," Rather recently told Stelter about impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.  Stelter often invokes the importance of truth and facts in his run-up to bringing on Rather, whose reputation was shattered for ignoring those things in the defining episode of his career.

Dan Rather calls on journalists to report what Trump 'really believes,' not what he says.  Former "CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather on Monday advised fellow journalists to report on what President Trump "really believes" rather than what he says during prepared speeches and on Twitter.  "To my fellow members of the press, I suggest we refrain from quoting the president's words from prepared speeches into headlines and tweets without context," the veteran broadcaster tweeted to his 694,000 followers.  "He sometimes says the right thing.  The real questions are what he does and what he really believes."  Mr. Rather expanded on the thought later Monday on "CNN Tonight" with Don Lemon, arguing that Mr. Trump is a racist and that journalists have a duty to report the "truth" on his bigotry.

The Editor says...
Dan Rather may be a mind-reader, but I can assure you that some of the "journalists" I've met can barely read their own minds.

The time George H.W. Bush stuck it to Dan Rather on live television.  Bush [41] famously stuck it to Dan Rather on the CBS news broadcast in the middle of a live interview in 1988.  Bush was angry because Rather had led into this interview with a six-minute news piece that insinuated Bush was much more involved in Iran-Contra than House and Senate investigations (controlled by Democrats, for what that's worth) had already concluded after extensive testimony and investigation.

Who Watches the Media Watchdogs?  Last Thursday, 300-plus newspapers took part in a national cry-in over President Trump's infamous "enemy of the people" statement. [...] No less an eminence than Dan Rather saw it as his bounden duty to strap on his trench coat and file his own piece in The Atlantic, "Why a Free Press Matters."  Rather sees other challenges facing the press right now, like failed business models and technology.  He even perceives some "self-inflicted wounds."  Curiously, on that point, Rather never mentions the way he disgraced himself and CBS News by pushing a phony story about George W. Bush's National Guard service — "an attempt," as described in The Weekly Standard, "by a prominent organ of the mainstream media to influence the outcome of a presidential election with a false and fraudulent story just two months before Election Day."  Rather could have tied that episode in nicely, considering that the New York Times headline about the scandal, "Fake but Accurate," may have been the first iteration of the controversial concept of "fake news" back in 2004.

Disgraced Anchor Dan Rather Loses It Over Sinclair Promising to Be Factual.  "Let's be clear, news anchors looking into [the] camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, a script meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn't journalism.  It's propaganda.  It's Orwellian.  And it is on a slippery slope towards some of history's most destructive forces.  These are the means by which despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses."  No, that wasn't a quote from a George Orwell or a Ray Bradbury novel warning about the abusive power of a state-controlled media and the flow of information.  That was disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather freaking out on Facebook Monday [4/2/2018] about a Sinclair Broadcast Group promotion promising viewers they would be factual in their reporting.  After a CNN report by Brian Stelter early last month, where he was clutching his pearls about Sinclair's promise, it was back in the news Monday after Deadspin put out a supercut video featuring many of Sinclair's anchors speaking all at once to make it feel creepy.  That was the catalyst for the new wave of pointless hyperventilating from the liberal media, including Rather.

Memo to Dan Rather:  Shut Up About Memos.  After years of trashing alternative media, which exposed the veteran CBS News reporter's monumental Memogate fraud in 2004, Rather has joined the ranks of pajama-clad online broadcasters.  The 86-year-old grandfather of fake news now uses Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to stoke the left's anti-Trump resistance — all while clinging bitterly to the vestiges of his defunct "legendary" newsman persona.  Consider Gunga Dan's comments on the House Intelligence Committee's release of the four-page Nunes memo alleging domestic surveillance abuses by politicized FBI brass working with Democratic operatives.  "Most respectable analysts," Rather asserted, "have determined that the contents of the memo are thin."  Who determined that these unnamed analysts are "respectable"?  Dan Rather.

Dan Rather:  Tanned, Rested, and Ready to Report Stuff That May or May Not Be True.  Back in 2004, Dan Rather anchored a 60 Minutes II report on George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in the early '70s.  The report included several memos that were supposedly written at the time, critical of Bush's military service.  The problem was, as former Earthling Charles Johnson soon discovered, the exact same documents could be created in Microsoft Word 30 years later. [...] The memos were amateurish forgeries, typed up in Word and then photocopied over and over until they looked "old." Rather got snookered.  He wanted to alter the course of history, so he believed what he needed to believe.  He was booted from CBS a few months later, but to this day he insists the memos were real.  A few years ago, somebody even made a pro-Rather movie about the whole debacle, hilariously titled Truth.  Unfortunately for ol' Dan, nobody saw it.  Dan Rather tried to end GWB's career, but ended his own instead.

But is it bigger than Rathergate?  Disgraced CBS newsman Dan Rather should never be able to live down Rathergate, the greatest media fraud of our time. [...] For public purposes, Rather sees no scandal in Rathergate.  On a 10 scale he has that one at zero.  He is still sticking by the story that led to his defenestration from CBS News.

How 'Fake but Accurate' Stories Sunk Liberal Journalism.  [Scroll down]  The answer should be familiar to those whose memories date back to the 2004 presidential election.  That fall, as the campaign headed into the homestretch, CBS's prestige newsmagazine show 60 Minutes ran a story questioning President Bush's National Guard service as a young man.  But the evidence backing up the allegation, which was reported by CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, was a forgery.  In what may have been the first major instance in which Internet bloggers debunked a major mainstream media story, CBS was forced to admit that the memorandums supposedly signed by Bush's late commander were fakes.  Rather than torpedoing Bush's reelection, that journalistic disaster led to Rather's resignation from CBS as well as the firing of producer Mary Mapes.  But an unrepentant Rather would continue to insist, as he does to this day, that the story was true even though the evidence was not.

Our Tarnished Media.  Dan Rather, in a recent interview, says he is worried about the political culture and the bitter divisions within it.  I wonder whether he has considered his own unique personal contribution to the bitterness and hysteria of our political discourse.  Donald Trump would have a great deal less credibility dismissing every reality he does not like as "Fake news!" if Dan Rather had not infamously attempted to peddle some actual fake news for the transparent purpose of trying to hurt the presidential campaign of George W. Bush.  Rather's attempt to use forged documents to push a fake story about a Republican candidate for political purposes did more than any other single episode of the past 20 years to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media. [...] CBS News, it should be noted, later acknowledged that the Rather story failed to live up to its editorial standards and apologized for it, but to this day has never publicly acknowledged that it was a political hit based on a forgery — something a little bit worse than a hoax, in reality.  It wasn't sloppy journalism:  It was naked partisan political activism.

Dan Rather: 'Dissent' Like Kneeling for the Anthem 'as American as Apple Pie'.  We at TruthRevolt aren't sure why news commentary shows keep asking former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather for his thoughts on the issues of the day, but MSNBC's Morning Joe did just that on Tuesday [11/7/2017].  The hosts asked the disgraced Rather his opinion on National Football League players protesting America's supposed systemic racism by kneeling for the national anthem prior to games.  Unsurprisingly, he affirmed that dissent was "as American as apple pie."

Dan Rather Laments That Americans Think the Media 'Make Up Stories'.  Former CBS journalist Dan Rather appeared on NBC "Today" on Tuesday [11/7/2017] where he lamented on the American people's lack of trust in the media.  "There's a recent poll that said nearly half of people think the media make up stories," host Savannah Guthrie noted.  "The media itself is under fire."  "What do you think the media needs to do better to enhance its own credibility?" she asked.  "We need to do a better job, we need to do our job.  Our job is to bear witness, to be honest brokers of information, to be as accurate and fair as we possibly can," Rather said.

Dan Rather Resurrects Disgraced Career As Trump Critic.  Dan Rather, the former CBS News anchor who resigned in disgrace following a retracted hit piece on George W. Bush, has resurrected his career in the Trump era as a consistently harsh critic of the president.  Rather, once again a recurring figure on television, is often found making grave statements about Trump's Russia ties and battles with the media.  Much like the president, Rather has had success at grabbing headlines with emotional and often alarmist social media posts.  Rather regularly (sometimes multiple times a day) crafts emotional, anti-Trump Facebook posts that go viral thanks in part to a tense media environment centered around the president.

How to Read the Newspaper.  The Associated Press has bias problems and some notable competency problems, and, like any organization that does any substantive reporting, it makes errors.  But it does not, for the most part, traffic in fiction. [...] Television has a somewhat worse record.  Dan Rather infamously attempted to derail the presidential campaign of George W. Bush by publishing a report, derived from fake documents, that Bush had been deficient in his military service, and that his superior officers had been pressured to cover up his shortcomings.  This was the event that really launched modern blogging as we know it, as dozens of critics ranging from politicos to typography experts showed that Rather's reporting was based on a fabrication, despite CBS News's strident defense of his work.

Dan Rather, Fake Newsman.  [Scroll down]  Rather is the journalistic Bernie Sanders, just as Sanders is the political Larry David. Watching cranky old men go nuts is fun.  This is nothing really new for Rather.  Entertaining his audience has always come first and if (as in Dallas) he sometimes mangled a story so badly that he would have been fired if he had been working on a small-market city desk, he always kept his newsman face on.  "Rather would go with an item even if he didn't have it completely nailed down," wrote Timothy Crouse in his chronicle of campaign reporters, The Boys on the Bus.  "If a rumor sounded solid to him ... he would let it rip.  The other White House reporters hated Rather for this.  They knew exactly why he got away with it:  Being as handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star at CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed."

Twilight Zone:  Rather Whines About Conway's 'Alternate Facts' Flub.  Dan Rather, a man whose career at CBS was destroyed by a lie he couldn't let go of, appeared on MSNBC's Hardball where he was outraged at Kellyanne Conway's coined term of "alternate facts."  "Well, to say it was unfortunate is, to put it mildly.  This was a big mistake," he declared as he started to tear into the president's advisor, "None of us can go into this world alternative facts."

Dan Rather Is Teaching Course on Truth in the News.  Anyone who is not rolling on the floor laughing must be too young to remember that Rather climbed to the top of Big Media only to see his career collapse in disgrace when he tried to sabotage George W. Bush's reelection with clearly fake documents casting aspersions upon W's National Guard service.

WSJ Editor:  Dan Rather Preaching Journalistic Ethics is Like Keith Richards Preaching AbstinenceWall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker has come under criticism for his appearance on Meet The Press this past Sunday, specifically his comments regarding reluctance to label falsehoods as lies.  Most notably, former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather wrote a Facebook post in which he called this editorial philosophy "deeply disturbing."  In an op-ed published Wednesday afternoon [1/4/2017] on the Journal's website, Baker fired back at Rather, whom he referred to as "a former television newsman of some renown."  In the piece, Baker dismissed Rather's criticism in snarky fashion.

Stop Fake News With The Realnews™ Revolution.  [Scroll down]  "You know what, you can put out completely false things and, especially the way the Internet works, it'll go viral and worldwide," complained Dan Rather.  "And the truth has no chance of catching up with it."  Unfortunately truth did catch up to Dan Rather, thanks to the internet, when his damning document from the Vietnam War about President Bush turned out to have been written in Microsoft Word.  Rather, who still insists that the Microsoft Word document was from 1973, complains about a "post-truth" world.  A recent movie in which he's played by Robert Redford who travels back through time to the 70s with his trusty laptop running Microsoft Word was named "Truth".  RealNews™ outlets praised it, but it barely made back half its budget at the box office.

12 Fake News Stories from the Mainstream Media.  [For example,] Rathergate:  The pivotal scandal of the New Media era was the pitiful end of Dan Rather's career at CBS News — a debacle so devastating to legacy media that liberals still try to rewrite its history, every time they think nobody's looking.  Rather and his producer Mary Mapes tried to throw the 2004 election (and, in the minds of the strongest critics, America's war effort in Iraq) with a phony story about George W. Bush's Air National Guard service, complete with falsified documents from the 1960s that were demonstrably generated using 2004-era word processing software.  Rathergate was a tremendous blow to the credibility of CBS News, which generated a fresh tidal wave of fake news stories to protect Rather after his report on Bush was detonated by bloggers.

Five movie reviews:

The Trouble With the Truth.  There are several problems with the movie Truth.  The first is that, notwithstanding its title, it is a pack of lies.  The second is that a large segment of the public knows that Truth is a lie, and has no desire to see it for that reason.  The third is that apparently — I haven't seen the film, and won't — Truth is a crashing bore.  So it's no surprise that Truth is a bomb.

Dan Rather, Still Wrong After All These Years.  Combine every speech about the nobility of the journalistic endeavor in every film glorifying reporters intrepidly searching out truth, and you still won't come close to grasping the level of treacle — there are other words — bubbling up out of "Truth." [...] The creative minds behind "Truth" — based on a book by the CBS report's producer, Mary Mapes — have wrapped Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes in a glow of heroic martyrdom so impenetrable there's hardly a line not put to its service.

"Truth" Nowhere Close to the Truth.  For entertainment, the movie appears to be first rate, starring Robert Redford as Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mapes.  For understanding of the real truth behind Truth, viewers are advised to look elsewhere.

Truth: A Terrible, Terrible Movie About Journalism.  Late in the movie Truth, the former 60 Minutes Wednesday producer Mary Mapes (played by Cate Blanchett) offers a Big Speech about the state of journalism, decrying the fact that all that people want to read or watch on television these days is "conspiracy theories."  The irony apparently lost on her (or at least on the writer-director James Vanderbilt) is that she makes this charge while she herself is in the midst of presenting a conspiracy theory.

The Fiction of "Truth".  The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled "Truth."  But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning.  In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his "60 Minutes" team — just weeks before the 2004 election — had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot.

This is a review of one of the movie reviews:
The Times stumbles onto...  The New York Times made itself a fool for the Rathergate film Truth.  The Times not only published Stephen Holden's breathless review of the film, the Times celebrated the film in a TimesTalks event featuring Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Dan Rather, and Mary Mapes, hosted by Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus.  Holden also included Truth in his year-end best-of-2015 list (it's number 7!).  The Times went all in for this tribute to the greatest journalistic fraud of our era, as I noted in the City Journal column "Truth and the New York Times."  In its year-end review of possible Oscar contenders, however, Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera stumbles onto the truth and blurts it out.

"Truth" doesn't pay.  With Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett as the stars, with Sony Classics spending millions to promote it, with the careful staging of the film's rollout, with the institutional support of the New York Times, I thought the film would have a good chance of doing well at the box office.  Nevertheless, the weekend results can't be encouraging to Sony Classics et al.  According to Box Office Mojo, the film grossed $901,000 over the weekend.  Playing at 1,122 theaters, the film brought in average gross per theater of $803.

Dan Rather on Bush Memo Story: 'We Got to the Truth But We Paid a Painful Price'.  Former CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather said 60 Minutes "got to the truth" in 2004 but paid a "painful price" for the story on former President George W. Bush's National Guard service that aired before the 2004 presidential election.  Aside from the authenticity of the memos, Rather said the "basic story" remains true today.

CBS refuses to air advertisements for 'Truth,' slams film.  CBS will not run advertising for the new movie "Truth," and has denounced the film as a disservice to both the public and journalists.  The film, starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford, revisits a painful episode in the network's past — the discrediting of a 2004 CBS News story on former President George W. Bush's military service record.  Redford plays former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, and Blanchett plays his producer, Mary Mapes.  The two were behind a "60 Minutes II" story that questioned Bush's military record.  CBS ended up apologizing for the story after documents used were called into question and could not be verified.  Mapes and three news executives were fired.  Rather left the network soon after.

"Truth," according to Mary Mapes.  The Rathergate film Truth opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday [10/16/2015].  The film, as I've mentioned a time or two before, is based on Mary Mapes's Rathergate memoir Truth and Duty.  Mapes stands behind the false and fraudulent story that disgraced CBS News.  She stands behind the fabricated documents on which the story was based.  And now she has Cate Blanchett taking a star turn on her behalf in the film, rewriting history along with her.

The paper of record shills for a movie that claims to exonerate Dan Rather — against all evidence.
Truth and the New York Times.  [Scroll down]  In the second part, based on documents supposedly from the "personal file" of Bush's commanding officer, Rather reported that Bush had defied an order to take a physical necessary to maintain his flight status and, among other things, thus failed to discharge his military obligations.  The segment was produced and written by Mary Mapes.  In researching the story, Mapes spoke to witnesses with firsthand knowledge of the Texas Air National Guard's personnel needs.  She was told that they needed pilots at the time, and that no influence would have been necessary to secure Bush's admission.  The documents on which Rather based the second segment proved to be fabricated on Microsoft Word in the computer era, not typewritten in the early 1970s by Bush's commanding officer or anyone else.  The content and format of the documents also betrayed their fabrication.  The story began to fall apart within a few hours of its broadcast.  On September 20, 12 days after the broadcast, Rather extended an apology "personally and directly" to viewers for his inability to authenticate the documents.

Dan Rather's Big Lie hits the big screen.  In their perversely titled film, Robert Redford plays Dan Rather, and Cate Blanchet plays Mary Mapes, the erstwhile CBS News anchor and producer who collaborated on a spectacularly flawed September 2004 story about George W. Bush's National Guard service.  Their report should be taught at journalism schools for a long time to come as an object lesson in how not to attempt journalism.  Rather and Mapes sought to prove that Bush got his spot in the National Guard through political favoritism and then went AWOL.  They rushed to air with a story that was too good — i.e., too potentially damaging to Bush — to check.  It fell apart under the slightest scrutiny, although Rather and Mapes continue to maintain they got it right.

CBS News Slams Rathergate Film: 'It's Astounding How Little Truth There Is In Truth'.  CBS News is hopping mad about the forthcoming Dan Rather-lionizing movie Truth.  They hoped it "would come and go quickly in limited release.  But [Cate] Blanchett is generating Oscar buzz as a best actress contender for her tour de force performance as [Mary Mapes,] the hard-charging producer swept up in a firestorm of partisan politics and media scrutiny of her work."  "It's astounding how little truth there is in Truth," proclaimed CBS in a statement.  "There are, in fact, too many distortions, evasions and baseless conspiracy theories to enumerate them all. [...]"

The truth behind Dan Rather's exit from CBS.  Dan Rather is coming to your local movie theater.  At least the story behind why he's no longer at CBS is.  In "Truth," Robert Redford plays Rather.  Cate Blanchett plays his CBS producer Mary Mapes.  In 2004, Rather reported that President George W. Bush's powerful father arranged to keep his son in the National Guard to prevent serving in Vietnam.  The report caused such hoo-hah that a treasured 24-year anchorman lost his job.

Junk Journalism.  Once upon a time, Dan Rather — the fallen CBS celebrity anchorman from the evening news and at 60 Minutes — was the master of "gotcha" journalism.  Rather would play up his populist credentials, do ambush interviews with supposedly self-important grandees, and then pull out an unknown memo, an embarrassing quote from one's past, or some sort of previously unexamined hypocrisy.  And, presto, down went the high and mighty, as Rather grinned that he had taken down another enemy of his middle-class viewers without power and influence.  Rather became a multimillionaire celebrity himself, and forgot the very rules of ethical journalism that he so often preached to his victims.  Nemesis finally — she is often a slowcoach goddess — caught up with him at 73, in the heat of the 2004 campaign and furor at the Texan-twanged, evangelical, Iraq War promoter George W. Bush.

From Rathergate to Rolling Stone: Fake But Accurate.  Rathergate has many similarities to the Rolling Stone rape hoax.  Both ignored the basic rules of journalism to pursue a narrative.  The narrative was so full of holes that bloggers and even casual readers realized that something was wrong and stepped in where the professional journalists had failed.  The difference is that Rolling Stone has even less investment in its journalistic credibility than CBS did.  The principals will not be forced out.  Their work may have been fake, but it was still accurate.

Hollywood to Release Film Defending Dan Rather in Wake of Brian Williams Stolen Valor Lies.  Echo Lake Entertainment is set to release its independent film, Truth, the story of former CBS anchor Dan Rather's self-destruction.  It's based on the 2006 book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the discredited CBS producer.  Mapes documents and defends Rather's 2004 attempts to use the forged "Killian documents" to portray former President George W. Bush as someone who shirked duty in Vietnam.

Rather full of it.  The [Rathergate] story is worth revisiting, it seems to me, to assess what if anything has changed in the intervening ten years.  My conclusion is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.  The media and academia and the culture are saturated with the same suffocating left-wing bias that facilitated Rathergate.  The animus endows Rathergate with an evergreen quality.

Dan Rather's Obsession.  Mr. Rather's 44-year career at CBS (24 years of which he spent as the anchor of the CBS Evening News) ended because of his role in a story that blew apart.  The 2004 story was meant to smear President George W. Bush a few months before his reelection.  The problem is that it was based on forged National Guard documents that were almost immediately revealed as such.  Yet Rather insists to this very day that the forged documents were accurate.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#10]  Rathergate (or Memogate):  In an effort to damage George W. Bush's 2004 run for reelection, Dan Rather — whose bias goes back decades — floated a story based on forged documents that claimed Bush had gone AWOL from his Texas Air National Guard unit back in 1973.  Internet sleuths, though, realized that the documents purporting to have been created on a 1970s era typewriter were actually made using a Microsoft computer font and obviously these computers did not exist in 1973.

Don't just laugh at Dan Rather — learn from him.  In 2004, CBS News anchor Dan Rather was given a series of memos purporting to show how George W. Bush had avoided service in Vietnam during the early 1970s.  Rather wanted so badly for the document to be real that he put it on the air without much thought.  He even sexed up his sourcing a bit, claiming (falsely) that the documents had been authenticated by experts.  It took nearly two weeks for the fake documents to be exposed and for this highly damaging story about George W. Bush to be disproven.  For most of that period, CBS News and Rather stridently defended their fake story, bringing further discredit upon the entire organization.

Dan Rather on Reddit: No one proved that Bush documents were forged.  Perhaps Rather believed that the Reddit community would agree with his version of the facts, but that wasn't the case.  Font expert Thomas Phinney, who has built a career on typography, responded on the Reddit conversation thread with a lengthy deconstruction of the forged Rather documents:  ["]I am on the left wing of the political spectrum, and I am also a typography expert who was quoted twice in the Washington Post about the memos, and approached by ABC News to get my opinion on the topic.  TL;DR:  they were blatant forgeries.["]

Fake But Accurate: Delusional Dan Rather Still Believes Forged Documents Were Real.  Nobody established the documents were forged?  Really, Danny?

Dan Rather: Bush AWOL Documents 'Not Proven' False.  On February 7th, Dan Rather participated in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit where he took questions from users. [...] Rather was asked if his AWOL story was true despite the "beating" he took over it.  In response, the newsman reiterated his long-time claim that his story was 100% true, saying, "no one had ever established that the documents were forged."

Dan Rather Doubles Down On Texas Air National Guard Story.  On Monday's [4/30/2012] edition of Good Morning America, former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather spoke with George Stephanopoulos about his new book Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News, focusing for a moment on the controversial 60 Minutes report about George W. Bush and his Texas Air National Guard service that led to Rather's exit at the network.

The return of "fake but accurate".  In 2004, bloggers exposed the memos at the heart of CBS' story about George W. Bush avoiding military service as forgeries, forcing the termination of producer Mary Mapes and the disgrace of 60 Minutes II and Dan Rather.  Defenders of CBS claimed that while the memos themselves were fakes, the story was nonetheless still true, a laughingstock of an argument that came to be known as "fake but accurate," and sometimes as "truthiness."

Combat Journalism.  We can pinpoint the moment that foretold the arrival of combat journalism.  At 11:59 p.m. on September 8, 2004, a pseudonymous blogger on FreeRepublic.com accused 60 Minutes of publicizing forged documents to cast suspicion on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s.  The charge was publicized by conservative new media and soon proved correct:  CBS was flaunting materials that had been produced using technology unavailable during the twilight of the Vietnam War.  The ensuing backlash claimed the jobs of four at CBS and pushed anchor Dan Rather into early retirement.

This page summarizes it well...
Rathergate  is the scandal surrounding the 60 Minutes II story aired on CBS in 2004 about George W. Bush's National Guard service.  Memos providing the basis for many of the claims in the report were supposedly created in 1973 and found in the files of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.  Bloggers and blog readers investigated the suspicious looking documents which were made available to the public on the CBS website and found them to almost certainly be poor forgeries created on a modern era word processor.  Four CBS employees lost their jobs over the report.  Dan Rather famously defended the report, claiming the memos might be "fake, but accurate" and later went into early retirement.

Mapes:  Crazy or Lying?  Mary Mapes is in the Huffington Post (your one-stop source for the craziest of the loony left) today [6/7/2006], insisting once again that the fraudulent CBS National Guard memos were genuine typewritten documents from the 1970s.

Fired CBS News Producer Unrepentant.  In her first interview since being fired, former CBS News producer Mary Mapes maintains that her controversial "60 Minutes II" story on President Bush's National Guard service was "true" and that "no one has proved that the documents were not authentic."

Dan Rather's Disgraced Cohort On Book Tour.  It is apparent that CBS News producer Mary Mapes hasn't learned anything after being fired for using forged documents to smear President Bush.  She calls White House official Karl Rove the "mastermind" of the attacks on her story but admits to the Washington Post that she has no proof of that.  The Mapes performance, which is designed to sell her new book, can only diminish the reputation of journalism even more.  Have we reached a point in journalism where the facts and evidence simply don't matter?

 Editor's Note:   Surely Ms. Mapes knows that her credibility is shot.  But she seems to understand that (in the absence of factual evidence) sometimes the best defense is a strong offense, which is the purpose of her book.  I doubt if she will change anyone's mind.



The latest:
Bush's Guard Service.  Veteran reporter, author and commentator Bernard Goldberg reports that when CBS News did its fake National Guard story on George W. Bush avoiding service in Vietnam, it knew it was a lie.

Recalling Rathergate.  Bernard Goldberg takes a look back at "Rathergate."  That's the sorry episode in which CBS News claimed, based on fabricated documents, that George W. Bush shirked his duty to his country during the Vietnam war by maneuvering his way into the Texas National Guard, so as to avoid going to Vietnam.

Another Media-Anointed 'Legend' Reveals True Colors.  Dan Rather commandeered the CBS Evening News for 24 years before sustaining a self-inflicted career wound.  Conservatives knew of his liberal biases for years, as they did with Thomas, but the general public likely did not.  That all changed with the forged National Guard documents, the media scandal which essentially ended Rather's big-league news career.

Rather out at CBS, sources say.  After 44 years, Dan Rather will leave CBS by the end of the month, at the latest, industry sources said Friday [6/16/2006].  His departure could come as early as next week. … Anchor of CBS Evening News for a record 24 years until being forced out in March '05 by the Memogate scandal, Rather was fighting to stay at the network in some "meaningful" capacity.  It was clear that the network wanted him gone.

Update:
Dan Rather Signs Off.  Rather's contract with the network was scheduled to expire in November, but he was unable to reach agreement with CBS on a new pact.  He had worked as a correspondent for "60 Minutes" since stepping down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" last year.

Reflections on Dan Rather:  Dan Rather's exit from CBS last week should prompt viewers to reflect on the nature of much of television journalism.  Rather and other anchors served, and still serve, their networks as "journalists" of a rather special kind — presenters of other people's work for which they get the credit.

The Dan Rather File:  Decades of Liberal Media Bias.  Numerous articles and video clips.

The Death Cry Of Snob Journalism:  Dan Rather, Professional Journalist, and CBS News, Professional News Network, want us to keep believing that they are the ordained purveyors of truth.  They are the mature and responsible mavens of media ethics.  They are the information gatekeepers with unparalleled judgment, dedicated to the high principles of The Craft of Journalism, unwavering in their crusade for the public interest.

Moving Ahead, Rather Throws Sad Look Back.  Mr. Rather's contract with CBS, and "60 Minutes," is not scheduled to expire until late November.  But he said yesterday that he and the network were close to an agreement that would end his tenure early, and that he was seriously mulling a new venture that, at least initially, relatively few viewers would be able to see:  he would develop and be the host of a weekly interview program on a high-definition television channel known as HDNet.

Happy Birthday To Me:  Wayward Heyward Cashes Out at CBS.  When beleaguered CBS News president Andrew Heyward finally resigned last Friday [11/4/2005], many wondered what had taken him so long.  Ever since 60 Minutes' botched 2004 story on Bush's National Guard service resulted in the purge of star producer Mary Mapes and three other staffers last year, Heyward's endangered status at CBS had been painfully apparent to network insiders.

Lame attempts to rehabilitate CBS:  One year after the credibility of CBS News collapsed over their use of fake memos against George W. Bush, lame attempts to rehabilitate CBS seem to be everywhere.  Dan Rather is now telling anyone who will listen that after defending the report, then apologizing for it, he now thinks it's true again.

Rather:  Bush Guard Memo Story "Accurate," Never Proven Not So.  In an interview with Marvin Kalb carried live by C-SPAN from the National Press Club on Monday night [9/26/2005], Dan Rather made quite clear that he believes in the accuracy of his Bush National Guard story based on what everyone else realizes were fabricated memos.

This article sums it up very well:
The devastation of Dan:  Though within hours of CBS' airing of the memos their genuineness lay in tatters across the Internet and the pages of the nation's major newspapers, the panel refuses to go there.  It concludes:  "The panel was not able to reach a definitive conclusion as to the authenticity of the documents."  Mountains of evidence, not least including the panel's own exhibits, show the memos to be forgeries beyond a reasonable doubt.

Who Was the CBS Forger?  Now that the brouhaha over Dan Rather's "Memogate" scandal is no longer front-and-center in the national media, one has to wonder why there's been no closure to the issue of the documents themselves.  Bill Burkett, the supplier of the documents to CBS, changed his story on the source of the documents, ultimately claiming that one "Lucy Ramirez" gave them to him.  No one even knows who Lucy Ramirez is, if she exists of if she's another figment of Burkett's imagination.

More Heads Should Roll at CBS.  [The Thornburgh-Boccardi report] reveals on page 130 that CBS News producer Mary Mapes, one of four fired because of the scandal, had documented information in her possession before the controversial September 8 broadcast that George W. Bush, while in the Texas Air National Guard, "did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots."  This information is critical because Rather, in the broadcast, insinuated that Bush was among the "many well-connected young men [who tried to] pull strings and avoid service in Vietnam."

Dan Rather's shoddy legacy:  Rather … is counting on a reversal of public opinion in the future, hoping to rehabilitate himself, just like his old nemesis, Richard Nixon.  "I've learned to trust the audience," he told the Los Angeles Times.  "The harshest critic could not be nearly as hard on me as I am on myself."  And that's absurd.  If Rather were the slightest bit hard on himself, he would have resigned the minute the forgery fiasco unraveled.

Good riddance to Rather.  Zeal is not bias and bias is not zeal, regardless of what spin is being put out in the media about Dan Rather.  At one time, when the big three broadcast networks had a virtual monopoly, their spin became "facts" for all practical purposes.  The way Dan Rather and CBS News tried to stonewall and brazen out the forged document scandal suggests that they didn't realize the extent to which their monopoly was gone.

Danny, ye hardly knew ye.  One can forgive Rather for thanking of the "hundreds of professionals" at CBS News he worked with, even if it was a wry reminder that he let a few fellow professionals get the axe for a story he was in charge of.  No, what was most revealing in his farewell was the way he decided to take the word "courage" back down from the shelf.

Myths, Memos and Dan Rather — A Nation Remembers.  As you read the hoaxes perpetrated by [the Left-Wing Media] against the American people, appreciate that these hoaxes were contrived from interwoven myths forged via repetition.  The purpose of these hoaxes was to defeat President Bush in Election 2004 and restore the Democrat Party to power.  It is incomprehensible that investigative journalists could get so much wrong about a story without a malicious intent to deceive the American people.

Inferring the Obvious.  It doesn't take psychoanalysis to figure out what Dan Rather's motivations were; the legal system has a process for recognizing bias.  Had the Panel applied in good faith the ordinary legal principles for assessing motivation, it almost surely would have inferred the existence of political bias on the part of Rather and Mapes.

What the CBS Report actually admits.  The Thornburgh/Boccardi Report … tells us quite a bit that is embarrassing to those who are paying for it. … The report generally indicates that Rather was acting in a Wizard of Oz capacity with no real role in the production of these shows. … Mapes came off far worse.  On every of the many panel findings of fact about the production of the show, its vetting and the questions of political bias, every single thing she reported to the panel was contested by the other witnesses and the facts themselves.

Political Bias?  What Political Bias?  Simply put, there was no reason for [CBS network president Leslie] Moonves to spend half a million dollars of the network's money on a report that could have been written for free by an intern with a dial-up Internet connection and a decent knowledge of how to use Google effectively.

Changing the subject from CBS.  The drama over the release of the CBS internal probe of Rathergate had several acts.  In the first act, nearly everyone acknowledged that the actual "news" gathering by CBS was amazingly unprofessional.

Richard Nixon's Revenge:  In September [2004], Dan Rather, using fabricated and forged memos, fired a head shot at the president of the United States.  The gun blew up in his face.  The rest is history.  At CBS, they know today that their power is disappearing, their audience is departing, and their credibility is shot. Conservative perseverance exposed the liberal bias, and technology killed the monopoly.

No Nose for News.  In some unfinished business from the "Rathergate" scandal, we continue to come across people who don't know that USA Today ran the same virtual story as CBS News, based on the same bogus Bush National Guard documents.  CBS apologized and fired four.  USA Today hasn't apologized or fired anybody.  It hopes the scandal will simply go away. … With few exceptions, the major media have let USA Today off the hook for using the bogus documents.

Anchors away.  No one, and I mean no one, inside or outside network news, would have predicted in January that Dan Rather would quit before his 25th anniversary in the anchor chair in 2006.  That was the early betting line.  Others thought Dan would stay as long as humanly possible and attempt to be the Strom Thurmond of network anchormen.

Bias to the Bitter End:  The Osama bin Laden video tape was big news in the final days of the campaign, and this news event was spun by the media so as not to benefit Bush.  A Washington Post story by Dana Priest and Walter Pincus said that bin Laden had "injected himself into the final days of the U.S. presidential campaign, warning that American voters will be held accountable for electing any president who seeks to destroy al Qaeda and persecutes Muslims."  But near the end of the article, if you read that far, the authors cited evidence that bin Laden was on the defensive, and that Bush's policies in Afghanistan and Iraq had put him there.  Clearly, bin Laden wanted Bush's defeat.

Rathergate continues.  As a result of the Thornburgh investigation into Dan Rather's phony document story about President Bush, CBS president Leslie Moonves demanded the resignations of executive producer Josh Howard and two other employees.  But they are refusing to resign.  Evidence shows that Howard was among the first to raise questions about the report.  Considering themselves scapegoats, the employees are planning to sue the network.  Their attorneys are saying they will subpoena records and e-mails that will implicate Moonves himself in the fiasco.

Tainted media:  Who in the major media has asked why John Kerry would need to be issued an honorable discharge during the Carter administration, years after leaving the navy, unless his original discharge was less than honorable?  One of Jimmy Carter's first acts as President was to issue an order granting amnesties to draft dodgers who had fled the country during the Vietnam war and also allowing an upgrading of military discharges that had been less than honorable.

The Joseph Goebbels award.  No need to prolong the suspense.  This year's Joseph Goebbels award goes by a narrow but decisive margin to CBS News anchorman Dan Rather for his planned broadcast on "60 Minutes" — just days before the election — to discredit President Bush's National Guard service 30 years earlier.

Investigators Blast CBS for Rathergate.  If you believe CBS' report it was all producer Mary Mapes fault — Dan Rather was not much more than an innocent bystander in the scandal that now bears his name:  "Rathergate."  CBS would also have you believe there was no evidence that politics played a role in CBS airing of a story based on forged documents.  CBS, for that matter, still won't say the documents were forged.

CBS Fires Four "Rathergate" Employees.  Four CBS News employees have been ousted in connection with CBS's flawed, inaccurate "September surprise" story questioning George W. Bush's National Guard service.

Brent Bozell Statement on Bob Schieffer Being Named to Replace Dan Rather:  "Naming Bob Schieffer to replace Dan Rather, even for the short term, further proves the CBS 'investigation' into the Rathergate fiasco was a whitewash. … "The problem starts at the top.  Les Moonves can no longer swap pawns and feel that will pacify the deserved criticism.  He must make bold moves and bring in people who are committed to reporting facts, not viewpoints."

Not Finding Bias, or Ducks.  The Thornburgh Independent Review Panel report on the September 8, 2004 Bush-Air National Guard story on 60 Minutes II didn't find any evidence of political bias at CBS.  This is not surprising, since they didn't look for any.

CBS and the Holy Grail:  Thornburgh and Boccardi … provided plenty of ammo for those who see bias.  There were the men who were cited as authorities on air, even though they had no personal knowledge of the documents.  There were the voices that contradicted Burkett — Killian's wife, son and superior officer — but who were left out of the story or misrepresented.  Not only did the show not heed experts who warned that the documents were dicey — it told the public these experts authenticated the papers.

Damage control at Black Rock.  The lawyers hired to independently investigate CBS have a lawyer/client relationship with CBS.  Presumably, as a senior member of that firm, Independent Review Panel Member Richard Thornburgh also has CBS as a fiduciary client.  Thus, unlike similarly named government independent investigations — this one is paid for by, and carried out on behalf of, the target of the investigation.

They Still Don't Get It.  The report of the independent review panel … was designed to lay the entire matter to rest.  But the upshot of the inquiry reveals a remarkable thing about the liberal media and their defenders.  They still don't get it.  The best indicator of this attitude is in some of the language used in the review panel's report.

It's Worse Than You Thought.  Curious how the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel decided the CBS documents weren't necessarily fakes?  Read Appendix 4.  Leave aside the "no political bias" finding; leave aside the kid-glove treatment of Dan Rather and Andrew Heyward.  This abdication of responsibility by the panel in the face of their own expert's conclusions is so startling that it legitimately calls into question — by itself — everything else in the report.

Rather tangled web of CBS:  Whether they knew it was a deceit or not I cannot say, but surely in their cover-up they recognized their deceitfulness.  Surely they knew they were stretching the truth when they claimed the phony documents they relied on to support their phony story were provided by "unimpeachable sources."  Those "sources" ended up being but one source, Bill Burkett.  And who is he?  Mr. Burkett is a well-known anti-Bush obsessive.

CBS News'  Boss Hired Private Eye To Source Memos.  If the documents are fakes, they are apparently illegal — it is against the law in Texas to forge a government document, according to Chapter 32.21 of the Texas Penal Code.  The chapter on forgery makes it clear that forging a government record, state or federal, is a felony.  But Mr. Burkett has never been pursued by authorities, who could feasibly force him to answer questions under oath about where he got the memos….

The big change in the news.  Determined to stay in character to the end, [Dan Rather] announced his retirement with the same ill grace with which he'd conducted his last and biggest scandal, claiming that it had nothing to do with his decision to step down.  When, of course, his disgrace still hangs over every word he says on air.

Liar, liar, now you're fired.  Dan Rather and his crack investigative producer Mary Mapes are still not admitting the documents were fakes.  Of course, Dan Rather is still not admitting Kerry lost the election or that a woman named Juanita Broaddrick credibly accused Bill Clinton of rape.

Will Paulson Resign from USA Today?  Accuracy in Media has been on top of this story since Day One, noting that CBS News and Dan Rather have been taking a beating over the use of the forged documents.  USA Today has a lot to explain and heads should roll there, too.  We noted at the time that USA Today received and publicized the phony documents from the CBS source, Bill Burkett, assuming they were authentic.

Dan Rather in Crisis:  An extensive collection of information and commentary about Dan Rather's scandal, how he got himself into this mess, and how he stubbornly kept himself in it.  Ultimately, Dan Rather wagered his credibility on this story, and lost it.

Dan Rather's Outrageous Liberal Bias.  Dan Rather replaced Walter Cronkite as anchor of the then-top rated CBS Evening News on March 9, 1981.  Since then, his on-air liberal bias has become the stuff of legend.  For Rather's 20th anniversary in 2001, the Media Research Center compiled some of Rather's most quotable bias, along with illustrations of his nearly-nonsensical "Ratherisms" and his equally-comical denials of liberal bias.  As ABC's Peter Jennings and NBC's Tom Brokaw reached their 20th anniversaries in 2003, Rather was still on CBS each night, a longtime liberal advocate masquerading as a journalist.

Blind Anger.  Anger, the most toxic of emotions, has poisoned the American left and much of the Democratic Party.  To the astonishment of many level-headed political professionals, the Kerry campaign is unable to let go of its charges that George Bush's Air National Guard service was deficient, even as CBS and Dan Rather become a national laughingstock for their airing of forged documents and inability to 'fess up.  The public plainly isn't buying the notion that something which may or may not have happened thirty years ago is determinative of the worthiness of the sitting President and Commander-in-Chief to be re-elected.

Rather's Denials and Lashing Out at Critics Over Forged Memos.  "Dan Rather in Crisis," a compilation section for the MRC's Web site of CyberAlert coverage of Dan Rather's denials and lashing out at critics over his use of forged documents in a political hit job meant to destroy President Bush.  And remember, Rather has yet to concede his use of forgeries.  The September 21 Chicago Tribune quoted him:  "Do I think they're forged?  No."

Statement by Brent Bozell on Dan Rather's Stepping Down as Anchor of CBS Evening News:  "Mr. Rather has many personal qualities we have found admirable, but he has, unfortunately, often misled the American people time and again with biased reporting on a wide variety of issues and subjects central to their daily lives.  Time and again the issue of a liberal bias in his reporting has been raised, and time and again he has chosen to simply ignore the criticism or deny the evidence."

Accuracy in Media Declares Victory Over CBS and Dan Rather.  Calling it the vindication of Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine, who started a "Can Dan" campaign 16 years ago, AIM today hailed the "retirement" or "resignation" of Dan Rather from the CBS Evening News.  However, AIM said that he has still not been held accountable for his vicious September 8, 2004, 60 Minutes broadcast that was designed to sabotage President Bush's re-election.  "This was a brazen attempt to deceive the American people and subvert a presidential election," said AIM editor Cliff Kincaid.  "It was a conspiracy to deceive and defraud."

 Editor's Note:   The following article appears on the CBS web site, and may contain unnecessary superlatives and self-serving rhetoric.

Who Will Replace Dan Rather?  With Dan Rather's announcement that he will step down as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News in March, speculation is on about who will next occupy one of the most visible chairs in American journalism.

An obnoxious Rathergate delay:  Speaking to a media conference thrown by the financial giant Goldman Sachs last week, CBS boss Les Moonves gave his view from the mountaintop about the Dan Rather forgery scandal and how the network's independent investigation would proceed.  "Obviously, it should be done probably after the election is over, so that it doesn't affect what is going on."  What?  Dan Rather and CBS try to destroy the Bush campaign with a file of phony military documents, and now they think it would be politically sensitive to release an independent critique of their bias before the election.

Another web page covers this topic:
CBS Against the World.  Amid mounting pressure, CBS has stood firm in its position that memos criticizing the president's military record are authentic and accurate.  However, other news outlets are systematically undermining every aspect of CBS' original story.

Goodbye to All That - Dan Rather goes the way of the dinosaurs.  Dan Rather considers it outrageous and offensive that anyone would question the judgment that led to this situation.  He defends what appear to be very shoddy methods (reading letters over the phone to sources, asking sources not to talk to the press, etc.), as if only a "partisan" or a fool would question them.

A Likely Source for CBS Bush Guard Memos?  A principal source for CBS's story was Bill Burkett, a disgruntled former Guard officer who lives in Baird, Texas, who says he was present at Guard headquarters in Austin in 1997, when a top aide to the then Governor Bush ordered records sanitized to protect the Boss.  Other Guard officials disputed Burkett's account, and the Bush aide involved, Joe Allbaugh, called it "absolute garbage."

ABC News or ABC spin?  As if Dan Rather's use of forged documents to try to discredit President Bush shortly before the election was not enough of a clue to the mainstream media's political agenda, ABC News has now joined CBS News in the political spin game.  What ABC News has done was too elaborate to be called a "mistake."

A 55-point chasm in military support for Kerry and Bush.  October 11 editions of Military Times publications (Navy Times, Army Times, Marine Corps Times, Air Force Times) carried an astounding story not likely to get much coverage in the establishment press.  Bush leads Democratic Sen. John Kerry 73 percent to 18 percent in the voluntary survey of 4,165 active-duty, National Guard, and reserve subscribers.

CBS Analyst:  "Presidency Slipping Away From George Bush".  All three Thursday morning shows [10/14/2004] led with Wednesday's debate.  Once again, CBS was the most emphatic in declaring that John Kerry had won, repeatedly touting its Web-based poll of 200 "uncommitted voters."  Early Show political analyst Craig Crawford insisted that watching the debate "you could feel the presidency slipping away from George Bush."

Meet Bob Schieffer, CBS's Dan Rather Echo.  Conservatives have complained that CBS's Bob Schieffer should not be rewarded with a moderator's post after CBS tried to crumble the Bush campaign with forged military documents.  They could suggest that Schieffer has failed the test of objectivity all by himself.

Rathergate is a sign of the times.  Bernard Goldberg, (author of "Bias") spent 28 years at CBS.  He called Rathergate "inevitable," a product of liberal groupthink and a predisposition to believe the worst in Republicans.

The gang that couldn't report straight.  Mary Mapes, the very liberal producer whose career is going the way of the dodo, has been working on the Bush Air National Guard story for five years — more than a year longer than Bush has been president.  That's not a sprint, it's a marathon.

CBS just doesn't get it.  It's not enough to say you're sorry when your network's most prominent and trusted journalists tried to influence the outcome of an election.  Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes showed no genuine interest in reporting the truth.  Their obvious motive was to discredit a sitting president, to portray him as a shirker unfit to be commander in chief.  Mapes has admitted she's been chasing this story for five years.  Her eagerness to move the story forward included urging Joe Lockhart, the former Bill Clinton White House spokesman now a top aide in John Kerry's campaign, to talk to Bill Burkett, the man who provided the forged documents to CBS.  Rather and Mapes must go.  Anything less makes CBS itself a witting accomplice in this partisan political attack.

CBS News, "Memogate" and Postmodernism:  What are we to make of Dan Rather's claim that the documents were "authentic" even if "fake"?  This is postmodernism in its purest form.  Rather, who continues to insist that he is a serious journalist committed to "investigative reporting without fear or favoritism," tried to persuade the public that the documents continued to prove his point even if they were counterfeits.  Has Dan Rather lost his mind?

Where's the outrage – at CBS?  Both [Dan Rather and Mary Mapes] are today material witnesses to a felony, the enablers of a criminal conspiracy to bring down a president through the creation and dissemination of forged U.S. government documents.  Yet, rather than acting like innocent parties of a vicious plot to destroy a president, Rather and Mapes are acting like a pair of co-conspirators, with grudging admissions and insincere apologies.

The media's role:  Twenty years ago, CBS News and Dan Rather might have been able to continue to bluff their way out of the forged documents scandal because the other members of the big-three broadcast networks were unlikely to press the issue.  The biggest mistake of Dan Rather and CBS News was in not realizing that it was not 20 years ago any more.

Viacom Board Needs to Protect CBS From Rather.  How should a business owner respond to a highly compensated employee in a position of great responsibility engaging in seemingly irrational behavior that is causing great harm to the firm and its brand names?  And what if the company is in a business like news reporting where reputation is everything?  Of course, it depends on the circumstances, but one thing is for certain.  Doing nothing is not an option.

 Read this:   Partisan Connections of Rathergate.  The "Rathergate" scandal of Dan Rather and CBS News using fake documents against President Bush demonstrates the fallacy of so-called campaign finance reform.  CBS News has an exemption under the law because it is supposed to be a bona fide news organization.  But the "Rathergate" scandal has all the earmarks of a Democratic Party operation, masquerading as "news," in order to evade legal limits on contributions to the John Kerry campaign.

The meaning of Dan.  Much as we'd like to put Dan Rather and CBS to bed without supper, one final point needs a hearing:  why this story matters.

Closing ranks around Rather is a disgrace.  Dan Rather's fellow broadcast news anchors closed ranks around him over the weekend calling the recent criticism of his fraudulent "60 Minutes" report a "kind of political jihad."  Both NBC's Tom Brokaw and ABC's Peter Jennings defended their colleague at a journalism gathering in New York City.

Lining Up in Dan Rather's Valley of Forgery.  Despite some sharp investigative reporting on Rathergate and some journalists who have seen bias (even "obsession") in the forgery-stained 60 Minutes story of September 8, a number of prominent journalists are joining Dan Rather inside his circled wagons.

Heads Should Roll at USA Today.  CBS News and Dan Rather have been taking a beating over the use of the forged documents, but USA Today has a lot to explain and heads should roll there, too.  It also received and publicized the phony documents from Bill Burkett, assuming they were authentic.  It used Burkett as a confidential source and its standards for "verifying" the documents turn out to be even worse than those of CBS News!

Report Says the Bush Documents Came From Texas.  The Washington Post reported that documents CBS says were written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian — who, at the time, was Bush's commanding officer — bore markings showing they were faxed to CBS News from a Kinko's copy shop in Abilene, Texas.

CBS Guard Documents Traced to Texas Kinko's.  There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Texas, home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents.

Texas Press Drops the Ball on CBS Memogate.  The fact that the big Texas papers stepped back and let the big dogs take over surely bodes more ill for good journalism than Rather's lapse.  There's no greater threat to a healthy and free press than editors and reporters who ignore a good story.

Dan Rather:  The Final Days.  Rather's conduct remains inexplicable.  Why would he risk his career on the authenticity of 30-year-old memos that CBS' own experts questioned and he apparently got from an inveterate Bush-hater who was demanding anonymity for his accusations?

NewsMax Poll:  Dan Rather Must Resign.  Millions of Americans are outraged by CBS News and Dan Rather for their obstinance in admitting they used forged documents to indict the military record of George W. Bush.

Killian Family Wants an Apology From CBS.  Gary Killian of Houston, son of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, a Texas Air National Guard commander over Bush in the early 1970s, says CBS owes his family an apology for airing false documents attributed to his father, according to a report in the Kansas City Star.

Rather's Game is Over.  The jig is up.  The game is over.  CBS tried to energize the country into voting against President Bush by highlighting forged documents it said would prove Bush's failure to serve honorably in the Texas Air National Guard.  The smoking gun went up in smoke.  Once caught, CBS and Dan Rather could have responded with a simple apology.  Instead, they went ballistic - and now must pay the price for their defiance.

Dan Rather's Last Stand:  Dan Rather and CBS News on Wednesday night [9/15/2004] came up with what looks like their final defense of the use of probably forged documents to discredit President Bush's service in the National Guard.  Rather said that the controversial documents may be "re-creations" of actual documents that he doesn't have!  The latest turn in the scandal is a clever ploy and shell game on the part of Rather and it may buy him some time.

The Father of the CBS News Producer Calls Her "Typical Liberal".  The father of Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer who reportedly spent five years trying to prove George W. Bush received special treatment in the Air National Guard, a quest which culminated in her eager acceptance of the forged memos, described her as "a typical liberal" who "went into journalism with an axe to grind, and that was to promote radical feminism," FNC's Brit Hume relayed Monday night [9/20/2004].

Dan Rather:  Fairly unbalanced.  Such an outrageous fraud was inevitable given the mendacity and outright partisanship of the press.  Burkett didn't come to CBS; CBS found Burkett.  Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, called Joe Lockhart at the Kerry campaign and told him he needed to talk to Burkett.  Lockhart himself is the apotheosis of the media-DNC complex, moving in and out of Democratic campaigns and jobs with the mainstream media, including at ABC, NBC and CNN.

CBS Accused of "Political Attack" in Federal Election Complaint.  The Federal Election Commission received a complaint Thursday [9/23/2004] asking that CBS be punished for broadcasting a "political attack ad" against President Bush in violation of campaign finance laws.

Hunters were already suspicious about CBS' Rather.  On [the evening of Sept. 5, 1975], a much younger and very dashing Dan Rather was the host of a CBS special entitled "Guns of Autumn." ... When the program ended, I realized Dan Rather had lent his journalistic credibility to a hatchet job on America's hunters.  "Guns of Autumn" wasn't an examination of hunting; it was largely a one-hour condemnation of hunting.

"60 Minutes" Document — Real or Fake?  The proposed letter that CBS used in [its] piece regarding President Bush's National Guard Service is indeed fake.  As a document specialist and graphic artist since 1975, the document is clearly a forged document.  In fact, one can see that someone also rotated the document by opening through Adobe Photoshop and counter-rotating it by 1 degree (CCW).

CBS Stands by Memos on Bush Guard Service.  CBS News acknowledges memos it received about President Bush's service in the Air National Guard are difficult to definitively authenticate, but says they came from "solid sources."  Some forensic experts were quoted by news organizations, including The Associated Press, saying the memos appeared to have been computer-generated with characteristics that weren't available three decades ago.

Some Question Authenticity of Papers on Bush.  An examination of the documents by The Washington Post shows that they are formatted differently from other Texas Air National Guard documents whose authenticity is not questioned.

Rathergate:  Thinking with your ideology rather than your brain makes you susceptible to being duped.  Dan Rather and CBS News are finding this out the hard way.

Rather Biased?  When memos "surfaced" from President Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard questioning Bush's commitment to serve, CBS' Dan Rather was all too ready to bite.  Now it appears the memos are going to bite back.  They might just be fake.

Modern Times.  With the New York Times reporting that a key 60 Minutes source has turned on CBS, their earlier decision to "stand by their story" has doubled a bet on a losing hand.  Retired General Bobby Hodges of the Texas Air National Guard repudiated the documents which CBS said he would corroborate.

The IBM Selectric Composer:  For a couple of days now we've been talking about whether the CBS memos could have been produced using the technology available in 1972 and 1973.  We've talked about two typewriters mainly, both widely used at that time:  the IBM Executive series and the IBM Selectric series.  Though the question has hardly been conclusively answered, the consensus of opinion among interested parties seems to be that neither an Executive nor a Selectric could have produced these memos.

One More CBS Document Example.  Here is an animated GIF, alternating between the PDF version of the Microsoft Word document I created, and the CBS News "original."

PC Magazine:  Not Even Close.  An article by Edward Mendelson at PC Magazine claims to have debunked my comparisons of the CBS News Killian documents with my versions typed in MS Word [in his article],  "Bush's Exam Doc - Real or Fake?"  A person writing for PC Magazine really ought to know better than to try to pull off such an obvious flimflam.  Now this, on the other hand, is a perfect match.
comparison

Electronic typesetting pioneer says the Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries!  First off, before I start getting a lot of the wrong kind of mail:  I am not a fan of George Bush.  But I am even less a fan of attempts to commit fraud, and particularly by a complete and utter failure of those we entrust to ensure that if the news is at least accurate.  I know it is asking far too much to expect the news to be unbiased.  But the people involved should not actually lie to us, or promulgate lies created by hoaxers, through their own incompetence.

Dan's world:  After a week in the media pillory, beginning in the blogosphere and spreading even to the mainstream media bastions of the Washington Post and ABC News, Dan Rather and CBS have suggested, barely, that their documents may be fake.

Bush Guard papers "forged":  New information casts additional doubts about the authenticity of the memos purportedly written concerning President Bush by a former superior officer in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s, as Dan Rather and CBS News doggedly stuck to their guns defending the documents.  "They're forged as hell," said Earl W. Lively, 76, who during the era in question was director of Texas Air National Guard operations in Austin.

News and let's pretend:  Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter-writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4TH.

What Did Rather Know, and When Did He Know It?  For someone like Sandy Berger, it is always better to claim sloppiness than evil intent, but for a news organization, the issue is not nearly as clear.  It is the job of an organization like CBS to sort out the real from the phony.  If they don't do that, what earthly good are they?

CBS News vs. The White House:  If there is some lingering doubt as to whether or not the CBS News documents on President Bush's service in the National Guard are fakes, the White House has itself partly to blame.  It continues to act as if one or more of the documents may be legitimate.  Considering the fact that the White House refuses to condemn the documents outright as forgeries, the media cannot be blamed for saying that the jury is still out.  Clearly, however, the burden of proof is now on CBS News to validate the controversial documents.

Kerry's Phony Evidence:  It now appears that the key evidence against Bush is a horribly obvious forgery.  The style of the lettering and the manner of the printing prove to even the most gullible reader that these papers could not have been authored in the 70's, as claimed.

Man named in Bush memo left Guard before document was written.  The man named in a disputed memo as exerting pressure to "sugar coat" President Bush's military record left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half before the memo was supposedly written, his own service record shows.

Former Killian Secretary:  "These Are Not Real".  Marian Carr Knox, the former secretary of President Bush's National Guard commander says that CBS's documents are fake and that she did not type them.

Finding the mystery man:  CBS, trying to defend its indefensible assumption that evidently-forged documents are real, is relying on Robert Strong's supposed authentication of the documents.  I tracked down the former Texas Air National Guard administrative officer in Austin, TX, and he said he did not authenticate them, but observed that "They look like they could be real."

Rather be wrong.  Dan Rather relied on the testimony of a hyperpartisan Democrat and former Texas politician, Ben Barnes, whose story about getting Bush into the Guard has changed numerous times.  Because Barnes is a co-chairman of the Kerry campaign, Rather needed something better than Barnes' word.  He thought he found it in four documents, which Rather claimed substantiated the report.  The only problem:  The documents are almost certainly forgeries — if by "almost certainly" you mean "absolutely, positively."

How weak is Strong's testimony?  The original CBS 60 Minutes II report about President Bush's military service claimed that Robert Strong, "now a college professor, believes these documents are genuine."  Strong, described by CBS as a "friend and colleague" of Lt Col Killian, said, "I was very fond of him, liked him personally."  That's important, because Mr. Strong is now just about the last witness standing.  But it turns out that (1) he worked in Austin, not Houston, and (2) had a professional, not personal relationship with Killian.  He admits he can't authenticate the documents.

Should the FEC Get Involved in Forgerygate?  I suggest asking CBS to immediately assemble an independent commission comprised of forgery experts.  The commission should be given one week to determine whether it is more likely than not that the documents in question were forged.  If CBS does not cooperate, a boycott against both CBS and its major advertisers should be organized.

 Editor's Note:   Media critics and others aren't suddenly dumping on Dan Rather just because of this latest incident.  The following article was written in 2001.

Dan Rather, Democratic Fundraiser:  The man who almost always described Kenneth Starr to his TV audience as a "Republican independent counsel" (hinting that the first adjective canceled out the second) is now an established "Democratic objective newsman."



Web sites:

Boycott CBS dot com.  The latest smear by CBS/Viacom against President Bush is a violation of federal election law.  We need your help to stop them!  For years, CBS/Viacom pushed for passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.  It is now in force.  It prohibits most corporations from criticizing politicians within 60 days of an election.  But it has an exception for media conglomerates, which is why the liberal media pushed for the law.

Rather Biased dot com.  Documenting America's most politicized journalist.

Rathergate.  Looks like a blog, seems to focus on humor.

Be sure to order your RatherGate Refrigerator Magnet.

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2013 by Andrew K. Dart



Rather Flawed.  "These sure look like forgeries," said William Flynn, a forensic document expert widely considered the nation's top analyst of computer-generated documents.  Flynn looked at copies of the documents posted on the CBS News website.  "I would say it looks very likely that these documents could not have existed" in the early 1970s, he says, when they were allegedly written.

CBS News denies Bush docs are forged.  Experts suspect damning '70s memos were created with a modern word processor.  Killian's widow and son also have questioned the memos' authenticity.  Marjorie Connell told the Washington Post she was "livid" at CBS and described the records as "a farce."  Connell said her husband did not keep files and considered Bush "an excellent pilot."  "I don't think there were any documents," she said.  "He was not a paper person."

Take a look at this document for yourself.  It is written in a proportional-spaced font.  Ordinary typewriters did not do that in 1973.  Only a professional typesetter could have produced a document like that in 1973 – not an office typewriter.

Questions Surface About Bush Memos.  Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software.  Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript – a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" – as evidence indicating forgery.  Microsoft Word automatically inserts superscripts in the same style as the two on the memos obtained by CBS, she said.

Other Networks Keep Quoting CBS's "Memos".  ABC, NBC and CNN all acknowledged Thursday night [9/9/20004] that their hyped reporting on Wednesday of new charges against President Bush's National Guard service might be based on a big hoax, but that didn't stop them from repeatedly quoting from "memos" that may be nothing more than a campaign dirty trick.

Those Discredited Memos:  The copies of copies of copies that formed the basis for the latest charges were supposedly typed by Guard officer Jerry Killian three decades ago and placed in his "personal" file.  But it is the default typeface of Microsoft Word, highly unlikely to have been used by that Texas colonel, who died in 1984.  His widow says he could hardly type and his son warned CBS that the memos were not real.  When the mainstream press checked the sources mentioned or ignored by "60 Minutes II," the story came apart.

Mainstream Media vs the Bloggers:

The death cry of snob journalism:  Dan Rather, Professional Journalist, and CBS News, Professional News Network, want us to keep believing they are the ordained purveyors of truth.  They are the mature and responsible mavens of media ethics.  They are the information gatekeepers with unparalleled judgment, dedicated to the high principles of The Craft of Journalism, unwavering in their crusade for the public interest.

Blogs:  Halting the march of the mainstream media.  A revolution is sweeping the American media that will eventually spread to this part of the world.  What is happening is that for the first time in decades, if not ever, the power of the mainstream media (MSM) in the United States is being seriously challenged by a mostly ragtag army of outsiders armed with little more than the internet.  The age of the blogger is upon us.

Speak now and forever wish you hadn't.  As a longtime observer of the blog phenomenon — awed by the volcanic energy and talent that erupts by the nanosecond and flows without pause — I'm a fan.  But I'm also wary of such unbridled power.  For all their attractive swashbuckling and bravura, bloggers also can become a cyber-mob that acts, as mobs do, without conscience or restraint.

Bloggers knew!  The CBS mess variously known as "Forgerygate" or "Rathergate" is by any other name a seminal moment in the blogosphere that holds promise not only for revolutionizing journalism, but also perhaps for problem-solving on a global scale.

Our new source.  Two full weeks before much of America knew of any problems with the story, experts on typography, on computers, on typewriters, on local National Guard offices and on the history of how we evolved from hot type to what we have today had tried, convicted and sentenced Rather and his operation.

 Excellent:   Making CBS play fair.  The network hostility to Internet commentary was obvious.  One CBS news executive referred to bloggers as people writing in their pajamas (i.e., not members of our esteemed guild).  Rather associated them with rumor and propaganda.  This seems to mean that many in the mainstream press still don't understand bloggers and tend to associate them with the Drudge Report on its worst day.  Bloggers make their case with hyperlinks to primary sources and other data.  Arguments without authority count for nothing, and soft-headed analyses and hoaxes are quickly exposed.

A revolution in news:  As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order.  We got a glimpse of the Internet blogger's strength this past week.

Here I Blog, I Can Do No Other.  As the unrivalled authority of the Mainstream Media (MSM) has collapsed, the MSM must curb its excesses and return to its primitive purity — or collapse under the weight of its arrogance.  We're talking about 2004, the Internet, the blogosphere, and the big news reporting agencies, right?  Wrong.  We're talking about the sixteenth century, the printing press, the first Protestants, and the Roman Catholic Church.

Mainstream Media Accountability.  The so-called mainstream media, including and especially the CBS Evening News, are in a state of decline.  Every single rating book which comes out shows less people watching their newscasts and more people watching cable, especially Fox News.  And then there are those people, now considerable in number, who no longer watch any television news.  They have computers.

One blogger sees A Parallel:  Rather received info from sources he believed to be accurate and broadcast a story about President Bush and the TNG.  President Bush received info from sources he believed to be accurate and began anti-terrorist operations in Iraq.

Further discussion at Instapundit:  Bill at INDCJournal earlier reported that the Boston Globe misquoted the statement of forensic expert Philip Bouffard.  Now Bill reports that CBS is repeating the Globe misquote as part of its efforts to defend its own position.

CBS Repeats Globe Lie.  I love the mainstream media.  One of them lies and the other one swears to it.

CBS Demonstrates Modern Journalism's Pseudo-Objectivity.  When confronted with evidence that it was duped, instead of admitting its error, CBS attacked its critics.

Dan's Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  "Powerful and extremely well-financed forces are concentrating on questions about the documents because they can't deny the fundamental truth of the story.  If you can't deny the information, then attack and seek to destroy the credibility of the messenger, the bearer of the information." (-- CBS's Dan Rather as quoted by the New York Observer's Joe Hagan, September 15.)

Other examples of media bias in Kerry's favor:

Kerry's support from the media partly stems from the fact that so many journalists are themselves liberal Democrats.*

From a past survey of the national media:
      · 80% have never voted for a Republican President.
      · 86% of the media elite decision makers said they seldom or never attend religious services.
      · 53% don't think adultery is wrong.
      · 56% believe the U.S. "exploits" third world nations.
      · 80% favor affirmative action programs over merit based programs.
These same people label conservatives "extremists, radicals, and mean-spirited."*

D.C. journalists favor Kerry 12 to 1.  The New York Times conducted an informal poll of journalists at the recent Democratic convention that showed they favor John Kerry for president over President Bush by 3 to 1, while reporters based in Washington, D.C., support the Massachusetts senator by 12 to 1.  Times columnist John Tierney said the poll was prompted by complaints by conservatives "that journalists' liberal bias has colored the reviews of the Democratic convention and his speech."

Study:  Kerry Gets Best Press Ever.  John Kerry is getting the most favorable network news coverage of any presidential candidate in the past quarter century, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University, in a study of television election news since 1980.



Post-election commentary:

Bush Made Better Grades in College than Kerry.  Why didn't Kerry release his records during the campaign?  After all, his refusal seemed like a cover-up.  Now we know.  Kerry's military records also include his college grades.  (The New Yorker printed Bush's grades in 1999, but Kerry consistently refused to release his.)  It turns out that "dummy" and fellow Yalie George W. Bush made better grades than did brainy, intellectual John Kerry.

George Soros and the Press:  "The media consistently ignore the fact that this so-called 'philanthropist' has had several brushes with the law," including a conviction in France for insider trading.  On March 24, that insider trading conviction was upheld. … This is the perfect opportunity for our media to finally start examining this billionaire's business and financial connections.  Remember this is the man who tried to buy the White House for John Kerry.

A bad election for old media.  More than in any other election in the last half-century, Old Media — The New York Times and CBS News, joined often but not always by The Washington Post, other major newspapers, ABC News and NBC News — was an active protagonist in this election, working hard to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush and doing what it could for John Kerry.

Newsweek Prints False Claim About Swift Boat Ads – Bozell Calls For Newsweek ApologyNewsweek claims in its post-election issue:  "When the Swift Boat vets made ads attacking Kerry with images from his 1971 testimony, they used a voice-over, an actor reading Kerry's words."  [It was no actor — that was Kerry himself.]

One last flip-flop.  Stunningly inaccurate exit polls released around noon on Election Day convinced news anchors, talking heads and even the campaigns that Kerry would win walking away.  But at 9 p.m., when the first actual results began to come in, the election flipped to Bush.  It was the first Kerry flip-flop that actually served the national interest.

Speculation Abounds on Bizarre Exit Polls.  As it turns out, the pre-election polls were strikingly vindicated.  They couldn't have been more on the mark, as President Bush did win the popular vote by a 51% to 48% margin, the last time I checked.  What does that tell us?  Simply that pre-election polling is still a remarkably reliable science.  From which we extrapolate what?  That exit polling is even more reliable — unless it is somehow tainted.  Which leads me to what conclusion?  That there was serious funny business going on with these exit polls.

A narrow escape.  No one even raised the obvious question as to why Lt. Kerry's honorable discharge from the Navy was issued during the Carter administration, even though his service ended earlier.  Was his original discharge not honorable but only made "honorable" retroactively under the Democrats?

Christian voters triumph over Hollywood left.  [The] re-election of President George W. Bush and the election of a number of new conservative lawmakers across the nation astonished liberal newsmen, pundits and handlers who, hours earlier, had believed allegedly rigged exit polls and were confidently whispering that a new mandate was going to sweep the nation.

The Ten Worst Media Distortions of Campaign 2004:  In a fit of candor back in July, Evan Thomas, Newsweek's Assistant Managing Editor, blurted out the truth: most reporters want President George W. Bush to lose and John Kerry to win.

My Apologies, Mr. Bin Laden.  Right before Bush's re-election, CBS fills its airwaves with stories hostile to the President and friendly to John Kerry, with CBS's business reporter telling viewers that "most Americans are, in fact, worse off," since Bush took office.  Plus, former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite speculated that Osama bin Laden's videotaped message was "probably set up" by Bush aide Karl Rove.

Post-election reflections:  This election has clarified to a remarkable degree which party is actually the party of ordinary Americans.  George Soros, Michael Moore, moveon.org, Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Affleck and a few other plutocrats spent a reported $200 million attempting to defeat George W. Bush.  They had the energetic assistance of The New York Times, ABC, NBC, NPR, CNN and particularly CBS.



The Media's Elastic Economy:  CBS's Dan Rather was pleased with the Clinton-Gore 2.7 percent growth rate reported right before the 2000 election.  "There is a school of thought that says this is overall good for the economy to keep it from overheating," Rather told viewers.  But under Bush 41 in 1992, the exact same 2.7 percent growth rate issued right before the election was soundly panned.

Is That All There Is?  Can this ridiculous missing ammo dump really be the Democrats' big October surprise?  Even the news media aren't holding ranks on this one.  Along with Fox, NBC is off the reservation.

All But CBS Relay Info Which Casts Doubt Explosives Lost by U.S.  ABC, NBC, FNC and CNN, but not CBS, on Wednesday night [10/27/2004] provided new details, about what is known to have happened at the al-Qaqaa facility in January to May of 2003, which cast more doubts upon the charge that the 377 tons of explosives disappeared after U.S. troops arrived.

Kerry keeps up missing-explosives attacks.  Mr. Kerry has shifted his argument since Monday [10/25/2004], when he blamed the president for the 380 tons of explosives missing from Al-Qaqaa, as news outlets have reported since that the explosives could not have been moved while the United States had control and that the amount was overstated.  In addition, according to an article in The Washington Times, the Russians moved the explosives while Saddam Hussein was in control.

The Usual Suspects:  It's a close election, and the mainstream media is only happy to oblige by teasing-up a fraudulent story for the Democrats to exploit.  Suffice it to say that Republicans are always cognizant of the particularly close relationship between media elites and their ideological soulmates, the Democrats.  And for the Left, spinning propaganda always trumps truth.

Not All "Journalists" Can Be Trusted to Report Truth.  It was Senator Kerry who decided to make service in the armed forces the focal point of this presidential campaign several months ago at the Democratic convention in Boston.  The ensuing firestorm — from the Swift Boat Vet ads to CBS's "Memogate" — has been the result.  Kerry has brought all of the criticism down on himself by underestimating the power of the alternative media; the Internet, talk radio and the cable news shows, which now have taken it upon themselves to set the record straight when arrogant politicians, relying on "ignorant Americans with short memories," attempt to paint themselves as people they are not and a complicit mainstream media goes along with the ruse because they want to protect "their guy."

Exposing and Opposing George Soros:  How many times have we heard or read stories about Vice President Cheney's old firm, Halliburton?  A public company with more than 100,000 employees, Halliburton had revenues of $13 billion in 2001.  George Soros is a human Halliburton who will be in a position if John Kerry is elected president to pull the strings.  He is reportedly worth $7.2 billion.  But his role in buying the White House for John Kerry has received gentle coverage.  Soros, we're told, is a "philanthropist" committed to "democracy."  The Republican Party, by contrast, is run by fat cats and Big Business, such as those at Halliburton.

New York Times Attacks President Bush's Faith.  The cover story in the Sunday New York Times was headlined: "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," was an unwarranted attack on the President's faith, according to Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of Traditional Values Coalition.

Guided by hidden hands?  The media are too busy repackaging old Iraq news in an October offensive against President Bush's re-election to investigate truly startling evidence unearthed this week that the Communist Party may have been directing John Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s.  The evidence, contained in captured communist records on file at the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University, shows a well-coordinated effort by the Communist Party to recruit U.S. servicemen to become part of the American anti-war movement.

The big media votes.  Regardless of who wins Tuesday's election (and no matter how long it takes to get the results following expected lawsuits and challenges to ballots cast by ineligible voters), this may well be the last election cycle in which the Big Media are taken seriously or regarded as influential.  The Big Media have gone over the top with this election.  They have ripped off their final layer of faux objectivity, revealing their ideological nakedness for all to see in a desperate effort to get John Kerry elected.

Who are the "brainwashers"?  Liberals are positively panicked at the idea that somewhere, on some station, at some late date, someone will say something negative about John Kerry without a moment for balance on the other side.  Let's be blunt:  Welcome to our world, liberals.

Cheering in the Press Box.  The welcome John Kerry got from a convention of minority journalists last week was a surprisingly up-front admission of the media's liberal bias.

Comeback myth:  Weeks before the debates between President Bush and John Kerry, some in the mainstream media worked overtime to boost Mr. Kerry's faltering campaign.  After a number of pollsters leaned toward Mr. Kerry for all or part of the debates, at least on style, those same "unbiased" journalists and media outlets are falling over each other to reinforce Mr. Kerry's "reputation" as the "Comeback Kid."

Misreporting the Duelfer report:  "Gotcha, Mr. President."  This was the consensus of the headlines from nearly every daily newspaper yesterday [10/07/2004] responding to the CIA's Iraq Survey Group report on Iraq's prewar weapons programs.

Firefighters Versus the Media.  One of the biggest stories of the presidential campaign is being ignored by the major media.  It's how the president of the firefighters union engineered an endorsement of John Kerry for president without asking his members about it.  It turns out most of the members of the union are Republicans who support Bush.

A Free Pass for "21st Century Lenin".  The major media are desperate to avoid scrutiny of how or where leftist billionaire George Soros is getting the tens of millions of dollars that he is using to finance anti-Bush advertising campaigns and pro-Democratic Party political efforts before the November 2 election.

Double Standard on Campaign Controversies.  Through the 2004 presidential campaign, the New York Times has faithfully pursued and treated as credible Democratic charges that George W. Bush failed to fulfill his National Guard obligations.  Yet questions about John Kerry's Vietnam service raised by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were dismissed as partisan and unsubstantiated.

Old media's disproportionate interest in Bush past:  What does it say about the Old Media that they are wholly uninterested in gravely serious and highly relevant charges against John Kerry yet investigate to death relatively minor and largely irrelevant claims against President Bush?

Pollaganda:  The Fourth Estate and Public Opinion.  Several studies to assess the political views of national reporters in the major press pools of Washington and New York find that those reporters overwhelmingly self-identify as "liberal" or "Democrat."  A recent survey, in fact, determined that only eight percent of those reporters would vote for a Republican — no surprise to objective media analysts.

The fall of the Big Media:  When his polls went south, Kerry's Big Media friends got desperate.  There was Dan Rather of CBS News' "60 Minutes" breaking a story based on fraudulent memos about George W. Bush's National Guard service.  Rather and CBS refused to admit they'd allowed themselves to be hoodwinked - or, worse yet, had deliberately perpetrated a hoax on the American people for political reasons.

Newsweek Editor admits the Media "Want Kerry to Win".  The media "wants Kerry to win" and so "they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic" and "there's going to be this glow about" them, Evan Thomas, the Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, admitted on Inside Washington over the weekend.

The Media  — John Kerry's Base.  Surveys over the past two decades show that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington.  Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.

Journalists Cheer Kerry.  You know that liberal media bias is getting bad when even the liberal papers take note of it.  Such was the case when a recent convention of minority journalists erupted into strong applause and a standing ovation for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.  USA Today ran a story about the event, noting that, "Journalists usually are polite but not enthusiastic when politicians speak at their conferences.  In the USA, at least, most reporters and editors try to appear to be non-partisan."

Bias Over the Bias:  Ernest Sotomayor is an editor of Long Island Newsday newspaper.  But he is also the president of UNITY:  Journalists of Color, Inc., and that is why he is in trouble.  His group made a mockery of professionalism in journalism when it gave a standing ovation and broke out in strong applause 50 times when John Kerry recently spoke to the group.

The Malkin Media Diversity Test:  The diversity they seek is, by definition, skin-deep.  They call themselves "journalists of color."  Not journalists of substance.  Or journalists of integrity.  Or journalists of independent thought.

When diversity is only skin-deep:  What the convention should have been told is that it is neither moral nor progressive to view the world through a racial prism.  Unity's "journalists of color" should have heard the blunt message that journalism does not need more reporters and editors of color.  It doesn't need more white journalists, either.  What it needs are men and women of talent and integrity — adults who have no interest in a "diversity" that is merely skin-deep.

No Doubt About Pro-Kerry Bias.  If there were any lingering doubts about whether network reporters are in the tank for John Kerry, Wednesday's newscasts put them to rest.

Pro-Kerry Media Expose Their Partisanship.  If there were any lingering doubts about whether network reporters are in the tank for John Kerry, Wednesday's newscasts [9/9/2004] put them to rest.

The Washington Post plays class warfare.  The media have a template — Republicans are for the rich, Democrats represent the middle class.  Any data that confirms this template is reported — often on page one — while any data contradicting it is ignored or buried on the back pages.  It is exactly this sort of thing that recently got CBS in trouble over forged documents.  All of the elite media tend to accept uncritically any information supporting a liberal worldview.  Anything going in the opposite direction is subjected to strict scrutiny.

60 Minutes Has Pounded on Bush All Year.  [For example,] 60 Minutes II broke the story of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and fanned the flames for three weeks, leading the networks to file hundreds of stories pounding on the Pentagon.

From Biased to Partisan - The mainstream media moves left.  If CBS were to admit that the documents were forgeries, it would have no grounds for protecting its sources.  In fact, CBS would have a positive obligation to do everything in its power to expose the malefactors behind the forgeries.  If the trail led back to the Kerry campaign, president Bush's reelection would be assured.  Dan Rather has been at pains to derogate those who are interested in where the documents came from.  This sounds suspiciously like Rather is concerned about what a revelation of his sources might mean.  Certainly, if Rather personally received the forgeries from a Kerry operative, it would be a disaster for Rather.  (It now appears that CBS News may well have received the documents from a partisan and highly questionable source.)

Dan Rather's Forgery Fit.  CBS News and anchorman Dan Rather have entered the journalistic equivalent of one of Dante's circles of Hell, forced to live forever with a scandal they created.  With their Texas Air National Guard forgeries, they now live in a neighborhood of national media embarrassments.  Faked Food Lion resumes. Staged GM pickup truck explosions.  Janet Cooke's profile of Jimmy the eight-year-old coke addict.  Jayson Blair's phony travelogues from "West Virginia."

Dan Rather and CBS News have written their own epitaph.  What should happen to Dan Rather and CBS News if those National Guard records impugning George W. Bush's service, revealed on "60 Minutes II" last week, prove to be forgeries?  You'd think Mr. Rather and network executives would be concerned enough about their own fate to hedge their bets on the documents' authenticity, but instead, they've dug in their heels.

One Down, One to Go.  Two of the major wire services, Associated Press and Reuters, have been caught blatantly violating journalistic ethics.  First, AP falsely reported that a crowd at a Bush speech booed when the President wished Bill Clinton a speedy recovery from heart surgery.  Before that, a Reuters editor sent a hateful email to the National Right to Life Committee.  The bias will intensify as the election approaches.

Media Watchers Expect Anti-Bush Smear Leading Up to Election.  A media watchdog says while President Bush is currently doing well in the polls, it would be unwise to underestimate the ability of the mainstream liberal media to pull out all the stops in the waning weeks of the campaign. And one conservative political pundit is predicting the nation may well be entering what he describes as "the ugliest period in American politics in recent memory."

Democratic Convention Helpers, GOP Convention Resisters.  The so-called mainstream media never admit their liberal tilt, so the news analysts at the Media Research Center tirelessly document their bias.  The "award" for last week goes to liberal journalists who touted Democratic "rock stars" in Boston but who led the resistance to the GOP's convention.

Who drew first blood?  The prevalence of mainstream media liberal bias is a truism, but people generally think about it as merely an ideological slant on the reporting.  But in this year's presidential campaign, at least, we're seeing more than a "coloration" of the news.  Distortion is more accurate.

The hometown paper sulks.  The official boosters of New York City couldn't be happier that the Republican Party brought their show to the city that never sleeps.  It's too bad we can't say the same for the New York Times, which greeted the convention with about as much as enthusiasm as a first-grader greets the measles.

The herd that is our press.  The problem with writing about media bias is that it always sounds like sour grapes to people who don't agree with you, and like old news to people who do.  So I'm just going to assert that that, from my perspective, the press has been very pro-Kerry for a long time now.

War stories:  The ingrained leftist, pro-Democratic Party bias of the nation's mainstream media has been fully exposed.  All it took was for a certain Vietnam veteran to write a book daring to question the war hero status of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry.  Media lips are now drawn into a permanent snarl; the knives are out and the scent of blood is in the air.

Sandy Berger in trouble?  Send in the media!  The media — on its own — lowered Berger's stature in the Kerry campaign.  Way back in May 2004, The Washington Post called Berger "a top Kerry advisor."  After the scandal, the Post busted him down to "informal advisor."  Similarly, the Los Angeles Times in May called Berger a "Kerry foreign policy advisor."  It now tags him as an "unpaid consultant."  The Boston Globe in May called Berger a "top advisor."  Now the paper relegates him to "informal advisor."

Free Pass.  Amid the uproar over the ads run by the "Section 527" political committee known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Establishment media have remained eerily silent about the massive union-funded 527s that are spending exponentially more resources.

Reporters cheer Kerry, but snicker for Bush.  Some reporters at a recent convention of minority journalists said they were stunned and embarrassed by the partisanship displayed at two separate speeches, with cheers for Sen. John Kerry and snickers for his opponent, President Bush.

Partisan Cheers at Unity Upset Some Attendees.  The historic Unity convention in Washington is over but what it is being remembered for, at least in some corners of the media, is not the huge turnout of more than 7,000, but controversy over the alleged partisanship shown by many of the attendees in responding to separate speeches by presidential candidates Bush and Kerry.

NewsMax Magazine Exposes Media's War on Bush.  The major media will give at least $2 billion worth of friendly coverage to Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry this election year, NewsMax Magazine reports in its June cover story.  In its special report, "Media War on Bush," NewsMax Magazine calculated the effect of anti-Bush and pro-Kerry coverage by the major media outlets.

Sammon Exposes the Media's Anti-Bush Agenda.  In his new book, Misunderestimated, Bill Sammon lays out in precise detail the behind-the-scenes picture from some of the President's greatest triumphs.  He is particularly incisive and damning when he examines how Dan Rather and CNN coddled and sometimes even praised Saddam Hussein in order to get an exclusive story.

The RNC agenda vs. the media agenda:  For several weeks now, the national media have looked like the servile monkey to Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe's organ grinder.

Author Exposes Most Influential U.S. Newspaper's Leftist Slant.  A conservative columnist says the liberal bias of The New York Times extends far beyond the environs of New York and should be a matter of concern to every American.

Bob Schieffer and George Soros.  The Boston Phoenix article by David S. Bernstein noted that "more than $15 million of political advertising has run in the past three months, most of it bashing Bush, most of it in key battleground states — without costing the Kerry campaign a dime?  it's probably a big reason why John Kerry entered July in a dead heat in the polls despite the tens of millions of dollars spent on negative advertising against him — and one of the reasons why Bush's favorability ratings are at an all-time low."

Biased Media?  You Decide.



Other aspects of Dan Rather's career

Another Dan Rather Scandal.  Ever since his forced resignation in disgrace, Dan Rather has continued on a downward spiral.  His career, such as it is, has been kept alive by appearances on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, where he takes potshots at his former employer and President Donald Trump.  It is a sad spectacle.  Rather has now suffered another major embarrassment.  The former anchorman of the CBS Evening News has been accused by a website devoted to exposing military corruption of falsely claiming to have been a member of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Dan Rather: 'We must all stand up' to Trump.  Veteran journalist Dan Rather says all Americans must hold President-elect Donald Trump accountable.  "Now is a time when none of us can afford to remain seated or silent.  We must all stand up to be counted," Rather wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday [11/22/2016].  "History will demand to know which side you were on.  This is not a question of politics or party or even policy.  This is a question about the very fundamentals of our beautiful experiment in a pluralistic democracy ruled by law."  Rather said he is speaking out because of white nationalists celebrating Trump's White House win.

Dan Rather and His Great White Whale.  Dan Rather was once at the top of the journalistic universe, having replaced Walter Cronkite as the anchor of the "CBS Evening News" (when network news broadcasts still meant something).  But then came a story meant to smear President George W. Bush, based on forged documents that were almost immediately revealed as such.  Then (as [a recent] Daily Beast story recounts) came the Rather apology; the revelation that CBS News could no longer vouch for their credibility; the CBS-commissioned investigation faulting Rather and his top producer, Mary Mapes; and finally, the end of Rather's career at CBS.

Anita Dunn — Pots and Kettles.  On April 16, 2000, viewers of CBS' 60 Minutes saw Dan Rather interviewing Elian Gonzalez' father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. ... Here's what America didn't see:  "Most of the questions Dan Rather was asking Elian's father during that 60 Minutes interview were being handed to him by Gregory Craig," recalls Pedro Porro, who served as Rather's in-studio translator during the taping of the famous interview.

How Dan Rather Was Duped by the KGB:  Rather reported in a newscast on March 30, 1987, that a Soviet publication had charged that an American military laboratory had developed the virus that caused the AIDS epidemic.  He did not accompany this charge with any comment from the Pentagon or the State Department. … Eventually, the communists themselves admitted it was false.

Dan Rather Nods Through Clinton Whoppers.  Nobody expected Dan Rather to be as tough as Tim Russert in his 60 Minutes interview with Bill Clinton, but he sat idly through a series of Clinton whoppers and forwarded them without objection to the audience at home.  Some of Clinton's personal claims could have used less gullibility from Rather.

For Clinton, Dan Rather is Putty in His Hands.  The CBS Anchorman has a long track record of cheerleading and softball questions for President Clinton.

Danny Pearl's Widow Condemns Dan Rather:  The wife of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl slammed "CBS Evening News" anchorman Dan Rather for his network's decision Tuesday night to air excerpts of a grisly video showing her husband's death.

Dan Rather Touts Hillary for President:  "CBS Evening News" anchorman Dan Rather predicted Thursday morning [2/7/2002] that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton could win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2004 if former Vice President Al Gore decides not to run, explaining that no one else in the party could generate enough enthusiasm to mount a credible challenge to President Bush.

Does Dan Rather Have No Shame?  Dan Rather did it again tonight [1/29/2002], leaving a key factor embarrassing to Democrats out of a major story.  In a segment on "CBS Evening News" dealing with the massive bankruptcy of fiber-optic cable company Global Crossing, Rather totally ignored Democrat National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe's involvement in what could be as big a scandal as the collapse of Enron.

Dan "Ammo" Rather Cleans Up at Media Awards Roast:  Hundreds of self-professed members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy turned out to roast some of America's most notable newscasters by awarding them "Dishonors Awards" for their documented bias in journalism.

Related story:
Vast left wing conspiracy?  The other night I attended a dinner gathering of the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy."  I dined and laughed with nearly a thousand nicely dressed, politely behaved honest overachievers who came at the invitation of Brent Bozell.  We were at his Media Research Center's "Dishonors Awards" where we would "Roast the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of the Year!"

Another leftist double standard:  You remember Dan Rather, don't you?  You know, the impartial CBS News anchorman who recently spoke at a fundraiser for the Democrat Party of Texas ...the guy who recently stated that willful liar Bill Clinton is an "honest man"?

Studies Show Dan Rather's Leftist Bias.

In praise of bias:  Journalists have been accused for years of marching in liberal ideological lockstep.  They faced such charges even before CBS talking head Dan Rather turned up at a Democratic Party fundraiser, then awkwardly explained that he didn't know it was a partisan event until he got there and it ... ummm ... would have been rude to leave.

Juanita Broaddrick:  Dan Rather's Comments 'Sickened Me'

Dan Rather's Alleged "Liberal Bias" Triggers Sponsor Boycott.

Jeremiah Wright's Controversial AIDS Charge.  [Jeremiah] Wright isn't the first public figure to repeat the claim that AIDS is a U.S. weapon to kill people.  The claim that AIDS was manufactured by the United States was reported by CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather on a March 30, 1987, broadcast.  Rather was widely criticized for playing into a Soviet KGB disinformation campaign.  The charge had appeared in a number of Soviet and Third World publications before Rather picked it up.

"Media Reform" Targets Conservatives.  Ironically, [Dan] Rather is appearing on a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform that is supposed to unveil a "Big Media Hall of Shame."  Presumably, the inductees will be conservative media voices.

Back to School for Dan Rather.  Some might have thought that the 2004 election scandal would have ruined the career of Dan Rather.  Instead, he was given his own show at HDNet.  Now, four years later, Rather's show, Dan Rather Reports, offers viewers a glimpse into what the former CBS news anchor considers good reporting:  not citing sources, overlooking conflicts of interest, and sensationalizing material to promote marxist class-warfare perspectives.  All this is touted as news, even when Rather relies solely on anecdotes and ignores publicly-available statistics.

Dan Rather in Panic Mode: Move Inauguration to December 1.  Appearing on Friday's "Morning Joe," former CBS anchor Dan Rather chided President Bush for not doing enough during his lame duck period and argued for moving Inauguration Day up to December 1.


Update:  Dan Rather Fights Back

The return of Rathergate?  Dan Rather is back and he has another "scandal" based on a source that is questionable.  You might not have noticed Dan's return to "journalism" because he is on a channel called HDNet, obscure enough that Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, has chosen not to offer it.

CBS Is Sued by Rather Over Ouster.  Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on "60 Minutes" after forcing him to step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" in March 2005.  He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a "biased" and incomplete investigation of the flawed National Guard broadcast in order to "pacify the White House."

I'm Rather Grateful.  Dan Rather seems divinely inspired to crash more times than a Kennedy driving home from an office party.  The multimillionaire semi-retired newsman is suing for $70 million, $1 million for every year he's been alive since he was five years old.  Which is fitting, because that's what he sounds like.  The gist of his lawsuit is that CBS used him as a "scapegoat" in the Memogate story to "pacify the White House."  The swelled-headed former anchor, who used to brag incessantly about his toughness and independence, also whines in his suit that the network forced him to apologize under duress when "no apology from him was warranted," and that the former managing editor of CBS News "was not responsible for any such errors."

Dan Rather is going to win.  I don't know if he's going to get the 70 million bucks he's demanding from CBS.  But I bet he gets close to that.  Not because he deserves it... I'm not here to speak to that.  But because CBS, in its media heart of hearts, can't be bothered with it.  "It" is that nasty little National Guard piece on President Bush.  The piece with the forged documents and the sloppy editorial chain of command.

On the other hand...
CBS Can and Should Beat Dan Rather.  The suit involves how Rather was treated before, during and after the scandal that badly damaged the network back in 2004 and 2005 when it made explosive but false charges, based on phony documents, against President Bush just two months before the presidential election.  The story backfired on the network, reconfirming to millions of people the existence of a liberal media bias.

Return to Rathergate:  Rather, the former anchor of the CBS Evening News, is still really, really mad about losing his job in the wake of the George W. Bush/Air National Guard/phony documents story.  And now he is telling his version of events in the form of a $70 million lawsuit against his former employers.

Dan Vs. CBS.  Does Dan really think he can win this suit?  Or is he just hoping for a big cash settlement on grounds CBS doesn't need more bad press?  Was he canned to "pacify the White House?" Hate to believe that.  Not the way I feel about CBS and its traditions even now, 20 years after I left.

Rather's Revenge:  I assume that 75 year old Dan Rather doesn't play golf or collect stamps or knit.  Because, obviously, if he had a hobby, he wouldn't have decided to spend a major portion of his golden years pursuing even more gold than he already has.

CBS "Mystified" by Dan Rather's "Bizarre Allegations".  Today [11/16/2007], in New York Supreme Court, in response to Dan Rather's civil lawsuit, CBS filed a lengthy 30-page motion to dismiss the case.  CBS executives also released a statement today, noting that they are "mystified" by Rather's "bizarre allegations" but will "vigorously" defend themselves in court if need be.

Dan Rather's Last Big Story Is Himself.  If he weren't famous, he'd be mistaken for a veteran of a long-ago war:  khaki safari shirt on his back, scuffed combat boots on his feet, that wiry crest of a brow, rheumy eyes under heavy lids, lower lip jutting out like an ornery fish resisting a hook.

Rather Lawsuit Moves Forward.  It looks like former CBS News anchor Dan Rather will indeed get his day in court.  On Wednesday evening [1/9/2008] Justice Ira Gammerman of the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan made a preliminary ruling denying the TV network's motion to dismiss Rather's $70 million lawsuit.

Setback For Dan Rather Lawsuit Against CBS.  Rather's last months at CBS News were clouded by a disputed story on President Bush's Vietnam-era military service.  Rather says his employers made him a "scapegoat" to placate the White House after questions arose about the story.

Parts of Rather's Suit Against CBS Dismissed.  The ruling enabled both sides to claim partial victories in a case that focuses on the fallout over a September 2004 report on the weeknight edition of "60 Minutes," narrated by Mr. Rather, that raised questions about favoritism regarding President Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War.  CBS later said that it could not verify the documents on which the report had been based, and Mr. Rather was forced to step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" in March 2005, a year earlier than he had planned.

Dan Mad Over His Net Loss.  In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, the former CBS Evening News anchor says his reliance on the network's false promises that it would defend him after making him a scapegoat for a controversial news report cost him several high-profile jobs — and some lower-profile ones as well.  While he was once a hot property coveted by CNN to be its "face," the fallout from his report on President Bush's Air National Guard service resulted in him being turned away from even part-time jobs at CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, HBO, the History Channel, A&E, Discovery and National Geographic channels, the filing says.

NY judge lets part of Rather's CBS lawsuit proceed.  A New York City judge says news anchor Dan Rather can proceed with his $70 million lawsuit accusing CBS of violating its contract with him when the network fired him.  Judicial Hearing Officer Ira Gammerman dismissed a fraud complaint against CBS Corp. on Monday [9/22/2008] and a business interference complaint against CBS and former parent company Viacom Inc.  No causes of action remain in the lawsuit against Viacom.

Appeals Court Rules in Favor of CBS.  An appellate division of the New York Supreme Court ruled today [9/29/2009] in favor of CBS over Dan Rather, dismissing Mr. Rather's $70 million suit against his former employers in its entirety.

Dan Rather loses $70 million lawsuit against CBS.  A New York state appeals court on Tuesday dismissed former TV newsman Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS Corp in which Rather claimed he was made a scapegoat in a scandal over a 2004 report on then-President George W. Bush's military record.

Dan Rather Lawsuit Tossed Out, Former 'Evening News' Anchor Vows Appeal.  The New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division has thrown out Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against his former employer, CBS Corp.  "We find the complaint must be dismissed in its entirety," reads the decision.



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Updated March 22, 2023.

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