Posted on 10/16/2015 12:04:43 AM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
The episode known as Rathergate represents one of the great journalistic frauds of our time. The scandal erupted from a 60 Minutes Wednesday segment rushed to air on the evening of September 8, 2004, in time to influence the approaching presidential election pitting George W. Bush against John Kerry, as it was clearly intended to do.
The segment consisted of two parts that didn’t quite fit together except in their antipathy to Bush. In the first part, based on an interview with the vice chairman of Kerry’s national finance committee, Dan Rather essentially claimed that political influence had been brought to bear to secure Bush’s admission to the Texas Air National Guard as an interceptor jet pilot in 1968. 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. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
seldom meet
Seldom? How about never?
One of the more enjoyable instances of journalistic malfeasance.
1) Because it fell apart so quickly and was so thoroughly debunked.
2) Rather paid dearly for his attempted character assassination.
There was plenty to attack W on without making things up.
Just shows, do not try throwing a hay maker if’n there ain’t no hay there.
That was a great night to be on Free Republic. Freeper Buckhead’s initial post about the type face etc of the documents lit the fire. It became a conflation of posts shortly thereafter that the press couldn’t ignore
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