Recap and overview articles:

'60 Minutes' Editing Kamala Harris Is the Ultimate Deep Fake.  Dan Rather, the former anchor of CBS News, was a little ahead of his time.  He lost his job at the network over a fake news ambush of a presidential candidate.  Now we're watching his same network still engaging in fake news for Kamala Harris, blatantly and without a care in the world.  In 2004, just a couple of months before the presidential election, Rather presented on 60 Minutes II documents alleging a scandal with George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard deployment in 1972.  Almost immediately the documents were disputed as forgeries.  They were eventually confirmed as fake by experts for several reasons, one of which was that the typeface was not that of a typewriter from the 1970s, but comparable to a typeface from Microsoft Word software, released for the first time in 1983.  The scandal cost Rather, several producers, and even a network vice president, their jobs.

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 Abstinence.  Wall 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.

"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."

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

Nolte: CBS Tries to Rehabilitate Disgraced Dan Rather.  Disgraced former anchorman Dan Rather is 92 years old, and CBS, the network that fired him for trying to rig the 2004 presidential election, has joined the shameless rehab campaign.  During the waning weeks of the 2004 presidential election, Dan Rather was determined to ensure incumbent Republican president George W. Bush did not win reelection.  And so, on 60 Minutes II, he ran a story that claimed Bush went AWOL during his time in the Texas Air National Guard.  The story was true, and Rather had the documents to prove it.  The story was also phony and timed to devastate the wartime president.  Bush Jr. was exposed as a liar and shirker, in contrast with his Democrat opponent, John Kerry, who served a few months in Vietnam.

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.