Emotional Rather blasts 'new journalism order'

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.

Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent.

Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians "of every persuasion" had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a "new journalism order."

He said this pressure -- along with the "dumbed-down, tarted-up" coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics -- has taken its toll on the news business. "All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms," Rather said.

Rather was accompanied by HBO Documentary and Family president Sheila Nevins, both of whom were due to receive lifetime achievement awards at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards on Monday evening.

Nevins said that even in the documentary world, there's a certain kind of intimidation brought to bear these days, particularly from the religious right.

"If you made a movie about (evolutionary biologist Charles) Darwin now, it would be revolutionary," Nevins said. "If we did a documentary on Darwin, I'd get a thousand hate e-mails."

Nevin asked Rather if he felt the same type of repressive forces in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush administration.

"No, I do not," Rather said. That's not to say there weren't forces trying to remove him from the White House beat while reporting on Watergate; but Rather said he felt supported by everyone above him, from Washington bureau chief Bill Small to then-news president Dick Salant and CBS chief William S. Paley.

"There was a connection between the leadership and the led . . . a sense of, 'we're in this together,"' Rather said. It's not that the then-leadership of CBS wasn't interested in shareholder value and profits, Rather said, but they also saw news as a public service. Rather said he knew very little of the intense pressure to remove him in the early 1970s because of his bosses' support.

Nevins took up the cause for Rather, who was emotional several times during the event.

"When a man is close to tears discussing his work and his lip quivers, he deserves bosses who punch back. I feel I would punch back for Dan," Nevins said.

Rather praised the coverage of Hurricane Katrina by the new generation of TV journalists and acknowledged that he would have liked to have reported from the Gulf Coast. "Covering hurricanes is something I know something about," he said.

"It's been one of television news' finest moments," Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

Rather sidestepped the question of what should happen to the evening news in the expected makeover. "Not my call," he said. And he said he hadn't been asked, either.

"I gave it everything I had, I didn't hold anything back. I did the best newscast we were capable of doing," Rather said.

Nevins, who almost single-handedly has kept the art of the independent documentary on television, said the HBO documentaries show real life and do it with as little damage to the subjects as possible. She said the producers and directors "respect mostly the people on the other side of the camera."

Nevins said she didn't shy away from such R-rated topics as "G-String Divas" and "Taxicab Confessions" but noted that sex and passion have been topics of literature since Chaucer's day. "The most R-rated is a body bag, not a naked body," Nevins said.

He did try to turn an election. But, being human and very ambitious, his principal motivation was to get a scoop, to be the first with the mostest. And he didn't report a falsehood. He made assertions which couldn't be adequately substantiated. Quite a different thing.

First, since they weren't originals with original signatures, they would never have stood up in court. On that basis alone, proclaiming that the "documents" proved anything was not in the public interest.
Second, the "documents" were not merely copies, but very poor quality copies - of the sort that are produced when the copy in hand is a copy of a copy of a copy, perhaps ten generations. That is suspicious because the "documents" turned up only in 2004, ten years at least after their publication would have been political dynamite. How strange that people obtained copies and made copies from them, over many generations - yet only in 2004 did they surface at CBS.

some of the "documents" purport to have been produced only for file and would have embarrassed their putative author "I'll backdate but I won't rate" if seen by other officers.
the family of the deceased putative author, who would have had the decedent's effects, deny having had those "documents" - yet they did not turn up until ten years after they would have been highly valuable to Bush's opposition. But in 2004, the "documents" turn up at CBS - with no chain of custody.
poor copy quality - and no original - is routine for forgeries.

minor anachronisms such as old address for GW Bush when the current address would have been known and its use de rigeur; nonstandard formatting of memos and nonstandard usage within them. And a memo complains of undue influence by an officer who was already retired at the time to which the "memo" was dated.
The "documents" match perfectly the results of keying the same text into Microsoft Word operating at its default settings. This is amazing because:

USAF stationary of that time was not 8.5 inches wide; a memo typed on narrower paper would naturally tend to be laid out differently than the same memo typed on 8.5 inch wide paper.
among all four memos there was not a single hyphenated word at the end of a line, as would be common with the use of a typewriter.
the memos contain centered text - and Microsoft Word centers perfectly, down to the pixel level whereas typewriters center down to only the character level - an odd number of typed characters is not truly centered in the same way as an even number of typed characters because that would require adding a half of a space in the line.
Microsoft Word not only assigns differing character space widths to various letters - "w" being given more space than than "i" - but actually nests adjoining characters together if (for example) the hook of a "j" can fit under the top of a preceding "T". This is impossible on a normal 1970's vintage typewriter.
Microsoft Word automatically superscripts "th" if that character couplet follows a numerical character without an intervening space; the "documents" have an example of a superscripted "th" couplet immediately after a numeric character. The "documents" also contain a "th" couplet after a numeric character but with an intervening space - in which case the "th" couplet is not superscripted. Microsoft Word would not superscript the couplet under that circumstance, either.
The claim is made that "typewriters" capable of closely mimicking Microsoft Word existed in the early 1970s, but no example of a routine TANG document formatted in such sophisticated way has yet been produced. Since the National Guard tends to get hand-me-down equipment from the regular military, since a machine capable of that sophistication would have cost as much as a new car at the time, and since it would have been gratuitously tedious to operate at that level of sophistication for the sort of document which these "documents" purport to be, that is hardly surprising.

Mr. Bush was running, not as a former Lieutenant but as a sitting commander-in-chief, so from the Republican perspective thirty-year-old TANG memos are merely quint. But Senator Kerry wanted scrutiny of that history because he was running as a former Navy Lieutenant. CBS gave Senator Kerry a pass on an amazingly thin record as a politician in the past thirty years but pursued the merest possibility of evidence of mal/nonfeasance by Lt. Bush in the distant past in a way resembling nothing so much as Captain Ahab searching the Pacific for the great white whale. The story of "Lieutenant Bush skipped Guard Duty" collapsed under the weight of the evidence of the fraudulence of the supporting "documents."
At that point CBS reverted to the "modified limited hangout." CBS created an "independent commission" to make a show of investigating the matter - and to conclude that it was not possible to conclude that those patent forgeries were forgeries and to conclude that CBS's fanatical pursuit of the flimsiest "evidence" for the Democrat and against the Republican was not politically motivated.
So much for the good faith of CBS; with malice aforethought they aired a vicious, fraudulent hit piece in an attempt to manipulate the electorate and produce the election result they favored. And when caught, they stonewalled shamelessly. No objective journalist could fail to know that that is what happened. And no journalist who wishes to be considered "objective" by establishment journalism - including but not limited to CBS - dares to state the obvious truth.
Only a journalist like Rush Limbaugh - a journalist who is dedicated to the truth rather than to a staying in the good graces of go-along-and-get-along Establishment journalism - would tell the obvious truth of the matter. And the "conservative talk show host" journalists like Rush learned the obvious truth from the Internet. Ultimately, from Free Republic.

You seem to have to have looked more closely at the evidence than I did. I gave up when the experts were arguing about what they saw at the microscopic level...and still couldn't reach agreement. Also, you present as proven things that were, and still are, under dispute such as the stuff about the "th" and whether or not the TANG could have afforded typewriters capable of producing the "memos".

CBS gave Senator Kerry a pass on an amazingly thin record as a politician in the past thirty years but pursued the merest possibility of evidence of mal/nonfeasance by Lt. Bush in the distant past

Generally true.

The story of "Lieutenant Bush skipped Guard Duty" collapsed under the weight of the evidence of the fraudulence of the supporting "documents

No it didn't. Quite the contrary...but proof that would stand up in court never surfaced.

My experience and reading tell me that whether or not clever young men serve in the armed forces and/or fight in combat is a matter of choice. That's even more true when the men are from rich and powerful families.

Viet Nam was a very unpopular war. All sorts of clever young men avoided service and combat. So when people tell me that young George obtained entry to a well-known rich-man's safe-haven, that he avoided duty when he felt like it and some of his officers refused to criticize him for it, and that he got out the same way - all through family influence I believe it. When some of the principals - such as the guy who claimed to have actually done the family's bidding and the former TANG secretary - confirm it, I believe it.

Nor was this kind of thing limited to VietNam. It occured in all wars. Sometimes it was blatant when people avoided service by buying substitutes to take their place. More often, the dodges were more subtle; 4-F, special assignments, vital national work at home, etc. I'm not fooled by any of them.

Only a journalist like Rush Limbaugh - a journalist who is dedicated to the truth rather than to a staying in the good graces of go-along-and-get-along Establishment journalism

That's hilarious since Rush presents himself as a partisan entertainer and always has.

Don't fool yourself. Being objective when reporting the news is probably beyond human capability. Some are much better than others, no doubt about it. But everyone is biased by self-interest and limited vision.

The story of "Lieutenant Bush skipped Guard Duty" collapsed under the weight of the evidence of the fraudulence of the supporting "documents

No it didn't. Quite the contrary...but proof that would stand up in court never surfaced.
My experience and reading tell me that whether or not clever young men serve in the armed forces and/or fight in combat is a matter of choice. That's even more true when the men are from rich and powerful families.

Viet Nam was a very unpopular war. All sorts of clever young men avoided service and combat. So when people tell me that young George obtained entry to a well-known rich-man's safe-haven

The specifics of history matter. Viet Nam became a very unpopular war after the Tet Offensive. It didn't really happen overnight and - though I've seen on FR a posting which purports to document that John Kerry was ambivalent about Viet Nam while he was still in college - it wasn't well started on that road (at least in the popular press) until after Tet.
That matters to me in the sense that since Kerry is a year older than Bush, they made their decisions on the military at different stages of that evolution. Had Kerry been a year younger than Bush, and thus had Kerry like Clinton been in college when the ~~antiwar protests~~ draft riots were in full swing, Kerry's choice might have been to go to law school instead of signing up for the Navy and ending up in Viet Nam. In such case Kerry very well might have availed himself of choices which would have kept him out of harm's way.
But in fact the time Bush entered TANG was a time when antiwar sentiment was further developed than it was when Kerry entered the Navy. Bush did not, and has at no time claimed any different, sign up for an active combat arm which would have been sure to have gotten him to Viet Nam.
But he did join an inactive combat arm. Training as a fighter pilot isn't the way to guarantee you won't be activated and sent into battle. In fact the training to get you up to flying status isn't just a Weekend Warrior thing - you have to go into effectively active status for a significant time in order to train enough to attain flight status. Training to be a fighter pilot is expensive and time-consuming, and when Bush joined TANG he could not have known that the military would not decide that it needed to activate him after he was trained. And there is such a thing as an "operational accident" to consider the possibility of before you sign on for fighter pilot duty, even as a reserve.
Bush became an operational reserve fighter pilot, and maintained flight status until US involvement in Viet Nam was wound down. At that point the USAF pulled a boatload of fighter pilots back home and deactivated them. Many of them loved to fly and joined the Air National Guard. And suddenly the paucity of ANG fighter pilots turned to a glut. Instead of being an asset to the Guard, Lt Bush was competition for limited flight hours among all those combat veterans.
So if you were the commander of Bush's TANG fighter wing, would you at that point exercise yourself to make sure that Lt. Bush maintained flight status? Or would you not in fact prefer that he leave flight status and do something else? If you were in Lt. Bush's shoes in that circumstance, might you not in fact choose to do something else, and feel free to commit to an out-of-state political campaign?

you present as proven things that were, and still are, under dispute such as the stuff about the "th" and whether or not the TANG could have afforded typewriters capable of producing the "memos".

My professional career was in an office in a defense contractor. I saw tons of memos in my day. And before the advent of word processing I never saw a memo which could possibly have been confused with a product of Microsoft Word. Nobody was using a machine of the complexity which would have supported that sort of quality; if you had seen that sort of document back in the early/mid seventies you would have instantly taken it for the product of a print shop.
It would have been absurd to pay the price of a car for a "typewriter" capable of that, and it would have been absurd to take the trouble to operate such a complex machine for a memo. And some of these "memos" purport to have been written to file. Not meant to see the light of day, and yet they were made on the most complicated to use typewriter ~~in the office~~ that they had no reason to have in the office?
More likely than buying a white elephant like that, TANG might have gotten a hand-me-down typewriter from the USAF. And don't even think of trying to convince me that Killian typed those "memos" himself on such a complex machine. Killian's family says he didn't type - and my experience of such a meliu was that engineers didn't type either. I was one, and had taken a typing course in HS thinking it would help me in college. And I found that you "positioned" yourself in a bad way if you ever laid hand on a typewriter in the office. And a test pilot told me he had the selfsame experience, only worse.
On top of that, the Air Force used 8-inch wide paper back then. If you laid out a memo to look right on that size of paper, what would it look like when copied it onto eight-and-a-half by eleven paper? And wouldn't it be off-center?
Those "memos" were made on Microsoft Word, long after their putative dates. They were made by someone who had some experience of military correspondence but who was not immersed in Air Force culture circa 1973. They were not closely held for three decades, then suddenly copied promiscuously (as would be indicated by the poor quality of the copy) without reaching anyone but Bill Burkett. They were made in 2004 by Bill Burkett or someone he knows personally, and they were deliberately reduced in quality by repeated copying of copy of a copy, to obliterate any possiblity that experts could be certain that the signatures were bogus.
If TANG had had a machine capable of emulating Microsoft Word, the products of that machine would not have been limited to four memos about a lowly Lieutenant, however well-connected.

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