Posted on 03/06/2005 4:37:55 PM PST by wagglebee
Dan Rather may retire this Wednesday night as anchor of the CBS News. But before he does, the verdict on his tenure as one of America's leadings anchors has already been fixed.
Helping to seal that verdict is Mike Walker's new book "Rather Dumb – A Top Tabloid Reporter Tells CBS How to Do News."
Rather has been a cloud after last year's CBS "60 Minutes II" segment made claims about President Bush that turned out to be fraudulent.
Rather's aim, as Walker demonstrates, was to destroy President Bush.
In the end, Rather's plan backfired, destroying not only his already sketchy reputation, but undermining CBS News' credibility. Ratings went into the tank, and CBS executives fired several staffers.
A panel convened by CBS uncovered numerous shortcomings in the way CBS and Rather produced its report on the Rathergate affair. But Rather was largely spared the independent panel's wrath.
But Walker, a veteran reporter, frequent TV commentator and longtime editor of the National Enquirer, managed to dig far deeper into Rathergate than the panel, which was chaired by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press President Louis Boccardi.
In fact, the panel could not even bring themselves to admit that the bogus documents used by Rather were, in fact, bogus.
Walker's book makes the case that Rathergate was just the last chapter in many episodes where Rather showed his bias or disregard for the truth.
In "Rather Dumb" Walker unearths hidden or forgotten warning signs from Rather's past that should have alerted CBS as far back as 1988 that he was a ticking time-bomb certain to explode someday and leave the Tiffany network in shambles.
The Trial of Dan Rather
Walker puts Rather on trial, and before his imagined courtroom scenes get underway, he explores not only Rather's bizarre past but also digs into some of the more spectacular failures of big media to exercise basic rules of journalism. Rules that would have protected CBS from Rathergate.
Walker homes in on one of the more intriguing episodes in Rather's past that should have set off alarm bells at CBS. This episode could have been called "A Prelude to Rathergate."
In 1988, Walker recalls, Rather aired a special "CBS Rreports: The Wall Within," which purported to be the shocking story of the life styles of Vietnam veterans living wild in the forests of Washington state.
"By Rather's account, these were brave men – heroes even – whose spirit and sanity had been broken by their horrific experiences in the war's dark jungles," Walker recalls, noting that "the show delivered big time."
"Dan conducted searing interviews with ex-G.I.s who told of committing unspeakable atrocities while serving under the American flag. CBS touted the news special as "the rebirth of the documentary."
As it turned out, it was a Michael Moore type of "documentary."
Rather exulted in his journalistic feat of finding one Terry Bradley, who he described as a "fighting sergeant," who told Dan how he'd skinned alive fifty Vietnamese men women and children in a single hour "and then stacked their bodies like so much cordwood."
"Could you do this for one hour of your life?" asked the fighting sergeant. "You stack up every way a body could be mangled, up into an arm … a [breast] an eyeball … imagine us over there for a year and doing it intensely … this is sick."
It was, as Walker recognized at the time, a blatant fiction.
Walked as a youngster had run traplines, skinned plenty of small game and knew it was simply impossible to skin 50 human beings in an hour – he recalls it took him an hour to skin a single rabbit.
Rather's reaction to this whopper: "You've got to be angry about it."
Walker explains that Rather's failure to challenge Bradley or use his journalistic common sense was due to the fact that "he was suffering from an all-too common affliction: he'd fallen head-over-heels in love with a sensational story and didn't have the heart to challenge it, lest it fall apart." Sound familiar?
But that's not the end of it.
It seems that Dan and his colleagues had never even bothered to check the military backgrounds of the alleged "combat veterans" they put on display to inform America of their horrible experiences and the dreadful atrocities they had committed.
B.G Burkett, author of the acclaimed book "Stolen Valor," did take the trouble to check their military records.
To begin with, Burkett discovered that Terry Bradley, the "fighting sergeant" was an outrageous liar who had never seen a second of combat. He spent a year in military prison for going AWOL and his actual job was as an ammo handler. He had never stacked bodes, just munitions.
"Author Burkett's embarrassing probe of Dan's platoon of Vietnam phonies – who claimed that the horrors of combat had driven them to drink, drugs and mental torture of suicide thoughts – exposed a catalogue of lies," Walker wrote, citing specific examples of concocted war stories by men who hadn't fought in Vietnam engagements.
Dan's reaction when his news special turned out to be fiction?
You guessed it. He stonewalled. Walker quotes Anne Morse who wrote in National Review: "As angry Vietnam veterans began to call CBS to complain about the factual inaccuracies of ‘the Wall Within,' Perry Wolff, the executive producer who wrote the documentary claimed that ‘no one has attacked us on the facts.' Despite growing evidence that he'd been had, Rather also continued to defend the documentary." For Dan the story was a slam-dunk. It fit the standing liberal line that all Vietnam Vets were psychopaths.
Morse called the whole thing "The First Rathergate." Had CBS acted and dumped the man who had spearheaded and then defended a bogus story, there never would have been Rathergate II last year.
The Real Dan
Walker's background check on Rather yields a portrait of a man who perceives himself to be a superb, unbiased, hands-on reporter, yet one who has constantly proven himself to be willing to allow his liberal prejudices to color his reporting.
He also has had repeated lapses of ordinary journalistic caution when dealing with the facts.
In one of the more telling examples of Rather's penchant for stretching the truth about himself, Walker recalls a 2002 report that dealt with Rather's claim to have served in the U.S. Marine Corps, not once but twice.
Quoting "Stolen Valor" author Burkett, Walker shows that Dan "signed up for the military twice, not the Marines" and had never got through boot camp "because he couldn't do the physical activity … and was discharged less than four months later on May 11, 1954 for being medically unfit."
That means, as any Marine can tell you, unfit to be a Marine. You are not a Marine until you've graduated from Boot camp and gone on to serve in the Corps.
According to Burkett, Rather signed up for the Army Reserves when he attended Sam Houston University, but later dropped out, then graduated and signed up for the Marines.
So Rather quit once, and washed out once. That says Burkett means "he's neither an ex-soldier nor an ex-Marine."
Walker can't avoid noting that "this flag-waving anchorman unfairly attacked a man who had served his country. George W. Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard, completed his basic training and qualified as a pilot of military jet planes. He was honorably discharged.
It's not just Rather who gets a going over from this veteran reporter who compares the hard-nosed, meticulously fact-checked reporting at the National Enquirer where the rule is get the story and get it right or get out.
Walker has some fun comparing the lazy and biased journalism of the elite media that looks down its nose at the Enquirer's superb staff that runs circles around them whenever it goes head-to-head with establishment media types.
He illustrates his point by a thorough retelling of three of the worst examples of sloppy journalism: The New York Times' Jason Blair scandal, the Washington Post's Janet Cooke fiasco and USA Today's Jack Kelly mess.
All three scandals, Walker shows, were the result of shockingly sloppy journalism by the top editors of all three exalted publications.
At the end of fictional judge Mike Walker's imaginary trial, he finds Rather guilty of "getting suckered by a story that wouldn't fool a high school journalist," of leading his team into disaster and then letting them twist in the wind, of lying to the end, and of smearing fellow journalists who asked questions about his performance in Rathergate.
"Rather Dumb" is an extraordinary piece of work that should be read by anyone who wants to cut through the carefully fabricated Rather myths.
In these final days of Dan Rather, we'll hear a lot of hosannas for the veteran anchor with his own pleas that he is not a journalistic crook. One peek at Mike Walker's new book will reveal the sordid truth.
Anybody have a take on which direction Mary Mapes' book will go?
He should be held in violation of CFR. Not that Liberals follow the rules anyway.
It makes me wonder why CBS didn't treat it news dept. as a business instead of an advocacy journal.
Amen to that. CBS and other MSM's should be more thoroughly searched to see if they are actually "unbiased and fair".
Ah...how sweet it is to read that headline!
My guess is that Mapes will have to place the blame on somebody ABOVE her, and say that she never would have run the story without that person vouching for the authenticity of the forgeries and ordering her to run the story. The ONLY person who would fit that description is Ratherbiased.
The way I see it, they have him on wire fraud, election tampering, forgery and (potentially) perjury.
What a disappointing headline! This article is just about his leaving the evening news.
Duh!
Truly Amazing!
This is incredible too! Talk about falling short...oh daddy!
What also made me angry (during the election, and still today) is how everytime a story ran that made Bush look even slightly positive, they would immediately follow up with a seething anti-Bush story, usually, that freakin' Abu Graib nonsense. Yet I can't recall one segment run on these stations that was pro-Bush, seriously, not one that was positive (that wasn't followed by some kind of discalimer).
The other thing about Rather is that I always heard him say "Bush", not "President Bush" or "The President", always just "Bush". When he said it he always looked like he wanted to blowtorch his tongue immediately afterward.
To be fair though, Dan's Journalism 101 textbooks were probably written with tools on stone walls.
"I still think that he should be held criminally responsible for trying to interfere with a presidential election"
Thank God the truth came out when it did! Hopefully Wednesday will be his last day. Good bye and good riddance!
Sounds like must reading for nailing your lib friends with the truth about how they came to be brainwashed by network news propaganda.
Gather the kids,make some popcorn,tune to cBS,witness history.
Good Riddens to the old media.
No ... Blather wasn't 'suckered' by anything. He knew exactly what he was doing ... he wasn't Rather dumb ... he was Rather vindictive ... and now he's Rather pathetic.
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