Dan Rather's Day of Reckoning: It didn't start with Rathergate. (Highly recommended!)

The Weekly Standard ^ | October 4, 2004 | John Podhoretz

[quidnunc]

-snip-

CBS News airs a report about a Vietnam-era controversy. Almost immediately the report comes under harsh attack, its credibility and essential honesty challenged. There's a huge uproar, complete with calls for a congressional investigation. CBS is compelled to acknowledge certain errors in its handling of the story, though senior officials say pointedly that no one has challenged its basic thrust.

Does this sound familiar? It is, but this is not just a quick-and-dirty recap of the current mess at CBS. For the few CBS News staffers who have been at the network for more than 30 years, the events of the past few weeks must make them feel they're trapped inside Nietzsche's "eternal return." This is the third occasion over the past 32 years in which CBS News has been caught behaving unethically and irresponsibly in the reporting and editing of a hot-button issue involving the United States, the Vietnam war, and the behavior and conduct of senior officials in Washington.

One of those CBS employees with a long memory is Dan Rather, who has been with the network's news division for 42 years. If you want to understand why Rather is being so recalcitrant and finding it so difficult to make a full acknowledgment of his role in perpetrating a colossal journalistic and political fraud — and why he was so adamantly opposed to an internal investigation of his now-infamous story about George W. Bush's National Guard service — you need to understand that Rather saw his network weather two previous and surprisingly similar tempests.

-snip-

[nathanbedford]

I have no doubt that such censorship is their goal but I think Rush, for example, is just too deeply imbedded in our culture for us to tolerate such a raid on the first amendment. If the politicians on our side could not pull the plug on funding Sesame Street, imagine the firestorm if the libs went after Rush.

But you are right, the fairness doctrine is a spectre ever just over the horizon.

[Eva]

They are already attacking Rush, by demanding that he be taken off the FARTS (Federal Armed Forces Radio). They are trying to limit Scaife too, but have been unsuccessful so far. The problem is that the leftists see them selves as moderates, and only the right as radical. This issue could very well be an ultimate pyhrric victory, a true case for being careful what you ask for.

[Bob]

I was really surprised that there wasn't a mention of CBS'd slanderous story "The Wall Within" in 1988.

[WKB]

Poor Dan
Can't understand
Why his plan
to bring down The Man
Gets so out of hand
and **it always hit's the fan.

[dixiechick2000]

ROTFLOL!

Most excellent, WKB!
There's nothing more I can add. ;o)

Thanks, Magnolia!

[onyx]

You're a man of many talents.

[swampfox98]

His ratings are in the crapper and yet CBS hangs on to him. I don't get it but CBS better figure it out.

I've been away from Free Republic for over a month now, and I don't know for certain what people here are saying about the Rathergate thing.

Has it ever occurred to anyone here that this entire fiasco has been orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and her henchmen? I can think of no greater cause for Mary Mapes and Dan Rather to give their lives and careers to than in getting Hillary in the White House in 2008.

I also wonder about the Swift Boat ads? Could they be a part of Hillary's scheme to make sure Kerry loses, so she'll have free access to the Democrat nomination in 2008?

[WKB]

You're a man of many talents.


I know

[onyx]

:)

[Mo1]

Has it ever occurred to anyone here that this entire fiasco has been orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and her henchmen? I can think of no greater cause for Mary Mapes and Dan Rather to give their lives and careers to than in getting Hillary in the White House in 2008.

Yes it had occurred to me and it is very possible that is what she is doing

If that is the case .. she is also destroying her party in the process and outting them for who they really are

[The Real Deal]

Dan Rather's eternal return ends here with the collapse of his reputation and the collapse of the 20th-century American news industry in which he was one of the last grand potentates. And it is a bleak end, unless he can console himself with the thought that he didn't fail to live up to the standards of his predecessors. He followed perfectly in their footsteps.

This is the last paragraph. I highly recomend everyone read this article. Good bye SeeBS, you to Blather, and the rest of the MSM.

[swampfox98]

she is also destroying her party in the process and outting them for who they really are

But what will her party be in four years? Or the Republican party for that matter. Four more years of open borders and probably citizenship for 15 to 20 million illegals will mean a majority vote for the Democrat party forever, no matter how much they lie, cheat, steal, murder and plunder. I may be wrong, but I think in politics open borders brings on a new ball game, and it is slanted in the Democrats direction. I think Hillary knows this.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Thank God for the internet and talk radio.

Thank God for Ronald Reagan, and thank Ronald Reagan for killing the Fairness Doctrine which inhibited conservative Talk Radio up until the end of the Reagan Administration (which incidentally coincides with the advent of Rush Limbaugh's Excellence in Broadcasting network).

The voices that despise Fox (for pete's sake!) and talk radio despise debate, differing opinions, and in the end, they despise truth.

Philosophy 101 says that anyone who claims to be wise will act exactly that way. CBS et al claim to be objective. But in truth,

the claim of objectivity is indistinguishable from a claim of wisdom.

Certainly it has precisely the same effect.

[litany_of_lies]

The next Democrat president will make reinstitution of The Fairness Doctrine the #1 priority on the day they are inaugurated, and if at all possible will do it by Executive Order.

Of course, they won't CAMPAIGN on it, they'll just do it.

Which of course is why we can't afford to have another Democrat President until, say, 2020, which is about when the playing field will finally be about level.

[litany_of_lies]

Thought someone else would catch this.

The "giddiness and exhilaration" Mr. P is writing about is OUR side for finally having the proof of what we've known all along about MSM dishonesty, let alone bias.

The MSM's ability to, as you say, "make up events to suit their mission of taking property that doesn't belong to them" is not as great as it once was.

We certainly must stay vigilant, though, which won't be easy. There has to be such a thing as blogger/forum fatigue. If there is, I'm near it, and I'm nowhere near as active as many here.

[Chuzzlewit]

bump !

[ncpatriot]

Perhaps somebody will know this. In the 50s, I remember studying about "yellow journalism" in the 1800s. Is Rathergate and all the liberal bias in MSM for past 50 considered "yellow journalism"?

[quidnunc]

ncpatriot wrote: Perhaps somebody will know this. In the 50s, I remember studying about "yellow journalism" in the 1800s. Is Rathergate and all the liberal bias in MSM for past 50 considered "yellow journalism"?

Yes, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer would have been right at home with the CBS Memogate story.

[Starboard]

IT'S ALREADY BECOME a cliché to say that over the past two weeks we've been witness to a revolutionary moment in the history of media, the moment when the calcified Establishment that has dominated the dissemination of news in the United States for most of a century shattered like the fragile hip of an octogenarian.

Man, what a great sentence! The whole article is a masterpiece.