Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, almost certainly knew that what they had were forgeries, yet Rather used them on the air, and both Rather and Mapes continue to defend them.
Of course, Dan Rather is the person who told Bill O'Reilly in a 2001 interview that "I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things." This is the mainstream media. This is how it works. And Rather admitted the standard by which it operates.
Within 15 minutes, FReeper Buckhead had determined that the memos were "in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman", and alleging that this was an anachronism: "I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively."
Credit also to Powerline and Little Green Footballs.
From the left-wing biased Wikipedia:
[CBS's primary source and supplier of the memos, Bill Burkett (a Democrat activist in a county where the Democrat chair was Rather's daughter) "ad received publicity in 2000, after making and then retracting a claim that he had been transferred to Panama for refusing "to falsify personnel records of [then-]Governor Bush",[20][21] and in February 2004, when he claimed to have knowledge of "scrubbing" of Bush's Texas Air National Guard records.[22][23] Mapes was "by her own account [aware that] many in the press considered Burkett an 'anti-Bush zealot', his credibility in question."
"Mapes had also been in contact with the Kerry campaign several times between late August and September 6, when she spoke with senior Kerry advisor Joe Lockhart regarding the progressing story."
"On September 5, CBS interviewed Killian's friend Robert Strong, who ran the Texas Air National Guard administrative office. Among other issues covered in his interview with Rather and Mapes, Strong was asked if he thought the documents were genuine. Strong stated, "they are compatible with the way business was done at the time. They are compatible with the man that I remember Jerry Killian being." Strong had first seen the documents twenty minutes earlier and also said he had no personal knowledge of their content; he later claimed he had been told to assume the content of the documents was accurate.
"Emily Will noted discrepancies in the signatures on the memos, and had questions about the letterhead, the proportional spacing of the font, the superscripted "th" and the improper formatting of the date."
"In an appearance on CNN that day, Rather asserted 'I know that this story is true. I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn't have gone to air if they would not have been.'"
[That was a lie -- of course they would have. They DID.]
"In Rather's narration about one of the memos, he referred to pressure being applied on Bush's behalf by General Buck Staudt, and described Staudt as "the man in charge of the Texas National Guard". Staudt had retired from the guard a year and a half prior to the dates of the memos."
"On the evening of September 15, CBS aired a segment that featured an interview with Marian Carr Knox, a secretary at Ellington Air Force Base from 1956 to 1979, and who was Killian's assistant on the dates shown in the documents. Dan Rather prefaced the segment on the recorded interview by stating, "She told us she believes what the documents actually say is, exactly, as we reported."...In response to a direct question from Rather about the authenticity of the memo on Bush's alleged insubordination, she stated that no such memo was ever written; she further emphasized that she would have known if such a memo existed, as she had sole responsibility to type Killian's memos in that time period."
"In an interview with Rather, Burkett admitted that he misled CBS about the source of the documents, and then claimed that the documents came to him from someone he claimed was named "Lucy Ramirez", whom CBS was unable to contact or identify as an actual person. Burkett said he then made copies at the local Kinko's and burned the original documents. Investigations by CBS, CNN and the Washington Post failed to turn up evidence of "Lucy Ramirez" being an actual person."
[Makes an excellent pen name, however.]
Remember the statement from Rather that I quoted above: "I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things." THAT is the standard by which the "mainstream" media really operates. It's worse than just bias; it's out and out dishonesty. Bias is so 1960s.
Raqhtergate proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Good post.
Thanks.