Bump.
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.
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."
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.
It would be intersting to see an in depth investigation to see how many of Rather's stories were bogus.
Dan Blather is aggressive, all right.
He never let truth get in the way of his leftist propaganda.
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.
......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 SeeBS / dan blaTHer lying throughout his career ping. Fake but accurate reporting since his first day on the job.
Another raTHer story here. Rather climbing down from the pinnacle
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.
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
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.
Go figure.
To prevent duplication, do not alter the heading or invent a new one. Thanks.
Okay, who has a link to that "Index-finger to Ring-finger ratio" thread from yesterday? And we need a photo of Blather's hand to check it out...
Now that he's being forced into retirement, I'm just tickled pink.
Ping me if you know of a "media bias" ping list keeper here.