Posted on 01/25/2018 5:14:06 AM PST by markomalley
On Monday, January 25, 1988, 30 years ago tonight, Americans across the country saw with their own eyes an early example of the ugly liberal media attack machine. Dan Rather, the anchor of the CBS Evening News at the time, laid a trap and attempted to ambush then-Vice President George H.W. Bush on live TV. Of course, Rather’s goal was to embarrass the leading Republican contender for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination.
The segment was supposed to be a “candidate’s profile.” Instead, Rather screamed at the Vice President over the Iran-Contra scandal, making it the sole topic discussed. Visibly angry, he berated the Vice President: “You’ve made us hypocrites in the face of the world!”
But Bush didn’t just sit back and take the bias. He zinged the journalist by mentioning a truly embarrassing moment for Rather. In 2008, Rich Noyes quoted from The Quest for the Presidency, recounting:
...a notorious incident several months earlier when Rather, on location in Miami, had got sore at having his newscast held up by a tennis match and had walked off his set to call New York to bitch about it.
The tennis match had ended in his absence, and CBS, with nothing else to put on the air, had gone to black — an empty screen — for six minutes. It was the ultimate embarrassment for a network...
So when an unhinged Rather yelled and berated Bush, the Republican retorted: “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your whole career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?” Bush lowered the boom: “I have respect for you, but I don’t have respect for what you’re doing tonight!”
How badly did Rather’s botched effort to destroy Bush fail? Even his colleagues in the press were appalled. According to the February 1988 issue of the Media Research Center's MediaWatch, 60 Minutes co-host Mike Wallace chided, “The style was wrong. Dan lost his cool.” ABC's Sam Donaldson derided, “Rather went too far.... I don’t think we can get to a situation where we make — on our own authority— accusations.”
The cover of the February 8, 1988 issue of Time labeled it “the ambush that failed.” Then-Time associate editor Richard Stengel (and future Obama official) criticized the CBS anchor, describing the scene as “a powerful TV journalist hectoring the Vice President, who had been lured into the interview expecting that it would focus on his presidential campaign.”
Time’s journalists even conducted a poll to see who won the battle. The results weren’t good for Rather. By a resounding margin, 42 percent to 27 percent, Bush “came out ahead in the exchange.” Was Rather rude? Fifty one percent said yes. Only 38 percent said no.
The February 8, 1988 Newsweek critiqued: “Last week’s drama in the control room underscored the network’s uneasiness about its evening-news star. Intense and driven, Rather has a reputation for volatility that at times approaches instability.”
Rather’s obsession with derailing Bush presidential campaigns didn’t end in 1988. In 2004, he famously used phony documents in an effort to undermine George W. Bush’s reelection bid. Ultimately, it led to his ouster as anchor of the CBS Evening News. (Rather has been reduced to appearing on an online show on The Young Turks channel.)
Three decades later, journalists are still doing their best to undermine conservatives and Republicans.
What’s funny is, Rather supported Obama doing the same thing in Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Libya. Rather is a hypocrite
Of course . . . but then, if you did go back to that time, you would just be a Cassandra railing at your friends for not believing then what you did not believe then.Sigh . . .
Me too. I turned 70 recently.
I remember this happening, but I was a lurker then. Long before I signed up.
Thank you, Buckhead!
I was there in that discussion. Not the first thread but the second. It was an amazing time.
I remember when we were discussing the superscript and I said that my word version did not have the same relative height/location of the superscript. One poster said, “print it out and it will”. I did. And it did.
I was just mentioning the Dan Rather fiasco to some liberals on the internet last Saturday as the beginning of the end of the MSM we are seeing today. You can actually imagine how many of our current stories would have played out before that event. For starters, most of them would not be stories. They would have been as buried as JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe.
I also recall that it was a poster of FR named Backhoe that first posted that the typewriter used in the fake memo wasn’t available at that time. Free Republic assisted in exposing the truth about Rather!
Buckhead.
That was what I first thought when I read the headline - but this is about GHW Bush, not Dubbya.I was gonna post
Rather's Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeenand
That was Buckhead.
No idea, he hasn't posted in a bit over 3 years.
Perhaps he'll check in here?
Buckhead's last post here was on October 16, 2015. Not sure what happened.
http://freerepublic.com/tag/by:buckhead/index?brevity=full;tab=comments
Strangely enough, that was one day after Rush Limbaugh shined the spotlight on him for exposing the whole Dan Rather fake memo. http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3349030/posts.
Maybe JimRob gave him another screen name for his protection.
“Three decades later, journalists are still doing their best to undermine conservatives and Republicans. “
...decades later, journalists are still doing their best to undermine the opposition Deep State candidate to promote their own Deep State candidate.
Three decades later, journalists are still doing their best Dan Rather impersonations................................
BUCKHEAD ALERT ....BUCKHEAD ALERT..
Dan Rather has been instructing budding journalists for a long time.
https://www.udemy.com/danrather/
I’d much “rather” be reading that the POS had just died. But at 86, I doubt I’ll be waiting a lot longer. What would really make my day would be to read that Dianne Fineswine had “departed” too.
An Oldie, but a Goodie.
No Pelosi?
I hope he is still here, we all owe him such a debt of gratitude. I knew what passed for reporting was biased, but that opened my eyes to the fact reporters were willing to outright lie and create false documents to support their lies.
Rather should have been charged with tampering with government documents or something- what he did had to be illegal.
“No Pelosi?”
Naw, she’s only in her late 70’s, so unless her Alzheimers really gets going, she’s likely to keep “entertaining” us with her moronic statements for another decade. Anyway, keeping her as “minority” leader is just another “stone” around the RAT Party’s neck so she’s still “useful!”
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