Wrong from the Beginning

Weekly Standard Online ^ | 3/5/05 | Philip Chalk

[Jacksonville Patriot]

Wrong from the Beginning From the March 14, 2005 issue: Even in 1963, Dan Rather was a poor excuse for a newsman. by Philip Chalk 03/14/2005, Volume 010, Issue 24 WHEN CBS ANNOUNCED THAT IT will smile through the pain of Dan Rather's dying credibility with an hour-long retirement tribute in early March, the network released an image of a young Rather posing in front of the Texas School Book Depository, looking gravely into the distance. While a little nostalgia was understandable--what, no photo of Rather huddled over a fax machine last October?--CBS still managed to remind those who knew the anchor during his salad days in Texas how tendentious and unprincipled he was even then.

Eddie Barker, for one, remembers. The news director for CBS's radio and TV affiliates in Dallas at the time of President Kennedy's November 22, 1963, assassination, Barker is widely credited with first reporting on the air that the president was dead, having received word through a doctor acquaintance directly from the hospital ER. Rather, then based in Dallas as a reporter for CBS's national news broadcast and working out of Barker's newsroom, later took credit for the scoop, Barker says. The error is repeated in historical accounts often enough to annoy the now-retired Barker, though he says the falsehood was later acknowledged by Rather.

It was a different lie--one delivered on national news, and at the expense of children--that caused Rather trouble at the time. As reporters from around the world descended on the Texas city, Rather went on the air with a local Methodist minister who made a stunning claim: Children at Dallas's University Park Elementary School had cheered when told of the president's death.

The tale was perfect for the moment, reinforcing the notion among distant media elites that Dallas was a reactionary "City of Hate." It slyly played to a local audience, too: The school named was in upper-income University Park, one of two adjacent municipal enclaves that shared a school district and a reputation for fiercely protected, lily-white privilege. Finally, for the ambitious Rather--a native Texan and then a Dallas resident--the account represented the very sort of revealing, local dirt that the throngs of out-of-town competitors would have to work far harder to get.

Except that it wasn't true, and Rather knew it, Barker says.

Approached earlier by the same minister with what was a second-hand account, Barker himself had run the story by the school's principal and some teachers, all of whom denied it outright. Because of the shooting, which took place at 12:30 p.m., the principal had decided to close the school early, though without telling the students why. The children at the school--including three of Barker's own--were merely happy to be going home early, he was told. There couldn't have been any spontaneous cheering at the news of Kennedy's murder, because no such news had been announced.

Undaunted, the dogged minister--"a very, very strong liberal and a very, very strong Kennedy supporter," Barker says--moved on to Rather.

"Rather came to me, and I said, 'My kids are in school there, and I checked it out, and there's not a darn thing to it,'" says Barker. "He said, 'Well, great--I'll just forget it.' But instead of forgetting it, he went out and did this gut job on Dallas and its conservatism," with the preacher's story at the center of his report.

With the discredited account likely to be challenged by the local affiliate's editors before being fed to New York, Rather sidestepped a customary film-editing session with Barker and arranged to file the report live instead, Barker says. "And so here's Dan with the preacher, telling this story about kids at UP cheering when told the president was dead."

Livid at being lied to, Barker laid into Rather as soon as he returned to the newsroom, expelling the reporter and all his national-news colleagues from the building on the spot. "I said 'Get the hell out of here--you and this whole damn bunch!'" he says.

Barker's local TV and radio crews scrambled to arrange on-air interviews with teachers to rebut the story, but the lie had already traveled halfway around the world and would become an enduring part of JFK assassination lore. In the meantime, CBS was threatening to pull its affiliation with the two local stations for having given Rather and his colleagues the boot.

"The next day I let him back in," Barker says. "But I wanted to make darn sure that he knew he couldn't pull that kind of crap with me."

While well-known in broadcast-news circles, the incident did nothing to slow Rather's rise; his Kennedy coverage was decisive in his eventual move up to CBS's New York headquarters. "You have to give him credit," says Barker. "He's a very aggressive guy."

Aggressive to a fault, as the ignominious end of his four-plus decades at CBS makes plain. As Barker himself--a CBS newsman for most of his career--says, "Anybody who followed CBS's coverage last year knows that they were doing a gut job on the president."

Philip Chalk, member of the University Park Elementary class of 1974, is production director at The Weekly Standard.

[Jacksonville Patriot]

The schoolchildren story starts about a quarter-way down.

[mowkeka]

Bump.

[cgbg]

Thanks for posting this.

I remember at the time the liberal media were trying to lay some collective guilt trip on the people of Dallas.

A "climate of hate", "right-wing extremists", the usual stuff we still see today from our leftist reporters and commentators.

Meanwhile they totally failed to discuss the connections between Oswald and Ruby, between Ruby and organized crime. They never mentioned the names of Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Joseph Civillo, or Sam Giancana.

They spewed their prejudiced garbage and totally failed to investigate what really happened in Dallas that week.

[GVnana]

Rather went on the air with a local Methodist minister who made a stunning claim: Children at Dallas's University Park Elementary School had cheered when told of the president's death.

I remember that story. I remember my parents commenting about it. Dallas wore a blackeye for decades because of that. I've never before heard it wasn't true.

[basil]

I remember so well that story about the school kids cheering--and how horrified I was to hear it! We were living in Oklahoma at the time, and I remember how embarassed I was for my native state when this came out.

It wasn't until we moved back to Texas that I finally learned that it was all a lie. I have disliked Dan Rather for that, for lo! these many years.

I do not wish him well in his "retirement."

[pfflier]

One of the questions I keep wondering about is : How many times has this happened before?

I find it incongruous that the MSM will go back decades to smear the president but they are cavalier when they "validate" their own claims.

When they are put on the defensive or there is a rebuttal, they are "just reporting" the news and they cower under the cloak of the First Amendment when anyone challenges their "facts".

It has been a long time since they were "just reporting the news". Now, more than ever, they are the news. They are a self perpetuating entity. Much like a cancer, they are sucking the life out of true balanced fact presentation solely for the sake of their existance.

[aimhigh]

It would be intersting to see an in depth investigation to see how many of Rather's stories were bogus.

[nightdriver]

"You have to give him credit," says Barker. "He's a very aggressive guy."

Dan Blather is aggressive, all right.

He never let truth get in the way of his leftist propaganda.

[yarddog]

The Kennedy assasination was a textbook example of how the media can form public opinion with distortions and lies.

For a long time after it, (and even today) the people blamed were right wing extremists, and gun nuts. Also Southerners.

The fact that the assassin was a Communist seemed to be of no imprtance. He actually was a Southerner but with totally un-Southern views.

[Shooter 2.5]

They didn't have to. The Dallas Police got their guy and that should have been the end of it. Instead, a bunch of carnival barkers have made a cottage industry out of a tragedy.

[CitizenM]

I remember hearing that story. My parents saw it, and told me. We talked a lot about it, and my mother who was a huge JFK fan said it was because he was Catholic that the kids at that school did not like him. In her mind, it was simple prejudice against Catholics. She thought Rather was a hero for reporting it! (Luckily, I didn't listen to my mom on this, I never watched Rather.) I imagine there must have been similar conversations across America.

I never heard that it was not true, but given everything we know about Rather, I am not surprised.

[Arrowhead1952]

The error is repeated in historical accounts often enough to annoy the now-retired Barker, though he says the falsehood was later acknowledged by Rather.

......Rather sidestepped a customary film-editing session with Barker and arranged to file the report live instead, Barker says. "And so here's Dan with the preacher, telling this story about kids at UP cheering when told the president was dead."

Livid at being lied to, Barker laid into Rather as soon as he returned to the newsroom, expelling the reporter and all his national-news colleagues from the building on the spot. "I said 'Get the hell out of here--you and this whole damn bunch!'" he says.

Hear B$ on See^BS / dan bla^THer lying throughout his career ping. Fake but accurate reporting since his first day on the job.

Another ra^THer story here. Rather climbing down from the pinnacle

[Liberty Valance]

Sounds like the basis for an excellent new Ann Coulter book..."Seeds of hate" how Dan Rather made up history to fill the hole where his heart should have been.

[sully777]

Another famously contrived story:
April 8, 2004, Arizona East Valley Tribune

Commentary
War vet puts photos in context
By Gary Nelson, Tribune Columnist


Vietnam veteran Bill Laurie of Mesa deserves some space for his response to my Sunday column regarding last week's ghastly photos from Fallujah.

To illustrate how photos can define our perception of events, I cited a couple from Vietnam: One of a South Vietnamese officer executing a POW in 1968, and the other of a little girl fleeing a napalm attack in 1972.

Both photos were exploited by opponents of U.S. intervention in the war, but Laurie writes that their context has never been widely explained by the American press. By that, he means context in terms of immediate surrounding events, and in terms of the overall war itself.

He notes that the man executed by Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan had just murdered one of Loan's officers, the officer's wife and their six children during the Tet Offensive.

"In his escape attempt," Laurie writes, "he and his team pushed civilians out in front of them as shields from allied fire. War was boiling all around Loan when the prisoner was brought to him, and after hearing what the man had done Loan dispensed of the time and effort to haul him off to a POW marshaling area."

When Loan died in 1998, The Associated Press quoted photographer Eddie Adams as saying the execution was justified. "The guy was a hero," Adams said.
As for the napalm photo, Laurie said South Vietnamese planes, not American, were involved. They were defending a village from Communist attack when an errant napalm cannister dropped among friendly troops with whom the girl had sought refuge.

This military accident, Laurie writes, pales in comparison with the frequent, deliberate incineration by Communists of villagers who did not welcome North Vietnam's style of "liberation."

Laurie also said many "defining" pictures of the Vietnam War were never taken.
"Where," he asks, "are the photos of the over 36,000 South Vietnamese assassinated by VC (Viet Cong) hitmen?" These in turn were but a small percentage of those who died at Communist hands in Vietnam.

"Victims of VC assassination often died slow and very painful deaths," Laurie writes. "Some were burned alive, others impaled on bamboo stakes running from anus to mouth, others were disemboweled. Photos of these atrocities would indeed be 'defining,' yet even bland text mentioning VC assassinations is not found in high school history books."

Laurie is right. The more gripping the photo, the more journalists face a moral imperative to tell what Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the story."

Adams, who took the famous Tet Offensive photo, was well aware of this. "Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world," Adams later wrote in Time magazine. "People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.

"What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?' "

Contact Gary Nelson by email, or phone (480) 898-6541

[yarddog]

Although I don't doubt that Rather made that one up and is capable of doing just about anything dishonest, the story is not totally unbelievable.

I remember when I heard the news. It was during the lunch break. Soon, just about everyone was talking about it and most were happy. (we didn't know he was dead, just that he had been shot).

After some time, and probably reflection, the mood changed and you began hearing something like, "well I am glad he was shot but hope he doesn't die".

When the principal anounced on the intercom that he was dead, there was a definite feeling of sadness among the students.

One has to remember that Kennedy was very unpopular at that time, in that part of Florida.

[StarCMC]

Rather not!! LOL

BTW - I don't think he's climbing down from his pinnacle - he's being booted off kicking and screaming thanks to the Pajamahadeen!! Woo-hoo!! ;o)

[Jacksonville Patriot]

At a bargain rack, I found a book about Sam Giancana that his nephew wrote. According to the book, everyone involved in the assasination--Oswald, Ruby, even Tibbits [?] had Chicago connections. The story is that Joseph Kennedy had stepped on his fellow mobsters' (post-Prohibition) liquor-distribution toes. To save his life, he asked Giancana et al. to help him elect his sons to the presidency, thereby ensuring Mob control over American government. When they did help elect the Kennedy's, the patriarch, instead of protecting his friends, had Jack and Bobby use the Dept. of Justice to roll them up. Not surprisingly, the move wasn't well received. Supposedly, Sirhan Sirhan was heavily in debt to the Mob, and Sam Giancana was thinking about whacking Frank Sinatra over the Kennedy's disaster, but he liked him too much, personally.

[MeekOneGOP]

---

From the article:

It was a different lie--one delivered on national news, and at the expense of children--that caused Rather trouble at the time. As reporters from around the world descended on the Texas city, Rather went on the air with a local Methodist minister who made a stunning claim: Children at Dallas's University Park Elementary School had cheered when told of the president's death.

The tale was perfect for the moment, reinforcing the notion among distant media elites that Dallas was a reactionary "City of Hate." It slyly played to a local audience, too: The school named was in upper-income University Park, one of two adjacent municipal enclaves that shared a school district and a reputation for fiercely protected, lily-white privilege. Finally, for the ambitious Rather--a native Texan and then a Dallas resident--the account represented the very sort of revealing, local dirt that the throngs of out-of-town competitors would have to work far harder to get.

Except that it wasn't true, and Rather knew it, Barker says.

---

Dan Bla^ther's been lyin' for See^BS for a long time ..... ping!

[mabelkitty]

I wish he hadn't died, as well.
He was a lousy President who came from pond scum, and his entire family has been innoculated and allowed to exist in a bubble because he died a martyr.
If he had lived, liberalism in the Teddy Kennedy and Jimm Carter model never would have had a chance to take root.

[Desparado]

Not to change the subject, but I would give anything to see Ann Coulter turn her guns on the worst president/traitor in the history of our country. And once and for all set the record straight for everyone about the great "Jimmah Carter"!!