To this day, I am not aware that either the network or Dan Rather have ever owned up to the fact that these documents were forged.
And they were. As a career technical writer with experience in page layout and copy editing, I can tell you for sure that the evidence is damning...they were caught red-handed.
I have to wonder if Rather and the network just weren't tech-savvy enough to understand how incontrovertibly they'd been busted.