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An exuberant crowd of Dan Rather detractors met this afternoon at Veterans Memorial Park in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of the Big Ezy, to celebrate Dan Rather’s retirement and to participate in a Jazz Funeral for Liberal Bias in the Media. The crowd was in a partying mood, as it “second-lined” to the music of a New Orleans jazz band. Two popular Republican state reps, Steve Scalise and John Labruzzo, wowed the crowd with their Rather comments. Although Rep. Scalise cautioned the crowd that this is just the “beginning” of the end of liberal bias in the media, the exuberance...

Emptying out his cubbyhole office in the CBS News building on West 57th Street in New York, wading through stacks and boxes of memorabilia accumulated over the years, Dan Rather came upon a piece of framed embroidery made and sent to him a couple decades ago by a nun who was, one might say, among the faithful -- a regular and loyal viewer.

As Dan Rather steps down as anchor of the CBS Evening News on Wednesday, the person who deceived him with fake memos on President Bush's National Guard service last fall remains at large, spared from even the threat of a federal or state investigation. Both federal and state felony statutes exist that give law enforcement authorities the ability to pursue the culprit. But neither the U.S. Department of Justice nor prosecutors in Texas have taken up the cause. A spokesman at the Justice Department told HUMAN EVENTS that federal officials

The fetid amusement of killing Dan Rather ends tonight. . . . There's no pride in watching the deconstruction of a man. . . . And you can take your CBS backstabbers who found in Rather's last hours of weakness a chance to rise up and join the chorus of haters -- becoming smaller themselves as the time of his career suicide drew near -- . . . And yes, that includes Walter Cronkite. Take them all away. Anybody who found joy in this deserves to rot in their own mean-spiritedness. . . . From the tut-tut tone of Wolf...

MIDI - IT'S BEEN SO NICE TO BE WITH YOU It's been so nice to read the news Each night I could spew my liberal views But then I really messed up bad I made conservatives really mad I put in motion a lot of commotion...now I'm through Mary Mapes had said...she would get the big story And the Bush campaign would be dead She had promised it's in the bag So I believed in her...we would get him good But then, that bad detour That stupid woman is a worthless hag It's been so nice to read the...

Fired 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes, still standing behind her embattled story questioning President Bush's National Guard service, is writing a book defending the piece. "When this whole debacle started, I was asked by CBS not to say anything," the Dallas-based journalist said in a phone interview Wednesday. "I had to silently watch while my work was taken apart. I would like a chance to set the record straight about ... the very valid journalism behind the story."

Fired CBS Rathergate producer Mary Mapes is planning a tell-all book that could blow the lid off the scandal that ended Dan Rather's tenure as "CBS Evening News" anchorman and destroyed the credibility of the once-golden "Tiffany" network. Mapes, who obtained documents on President Bush's National Guard record that turned out to be forged, "is preparing to shop a book proposal offering an inside account of what happened at CBS News during the memo scandal," reports the New York Observer. "The book will constitute Ms. Mapes’ defense against charges of journalistic misconduct," the paper says. Mapes' literary agent explained that...

Dan Rather has apparently been told to keep his mouth shut when he leaves his anchor post on March 9, according to reporter Joe Hagan, writing in the Feb. 23 issue of the New York Observer. CBS sources told Hagan that the disgraced anchor has been officially muzzled. On March 9, when he steps down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," Hagan wrote, "he will be limited to seven controlled interviews with the press to avoid questions about the [Rathergate] scandal." In a blockbuster story Hagan revealed that a mere five days after setting up an independent panel to...

CBS News’ Boss Hired Private Eye To Source Memos by Joe Hagan On Sept. 20 of last year, CBS announced that it was employing an independent panel to investigate how 60 Minutes Wednesday had ended up relying on shaky-looking memos in its segment about President Bush’s past service in the Texas Air National Guard. The investigators, CBS said, would "determine what errors occurred in the preparation of the report and what actions need to be taken." Five days later, CBS launched another inquiry into the memo scandal. The network hired a private investigator named Erik T. Rigler, a former F.B.I....

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER will report tomorrow: 'Former 60 Minutes Wednesday executive editor Josh Howard has told colleagues that before he resigns, the 23-year CBS News veteran will demand that the network retract remarks by CBS president Leslie Moonves, correct its official story line and ultimately clear his name'... In the event of a lawsuit, Mr. Howard has told associates that he would like to see Moonves put under oath to talk about his own roles in the network's stubborn, hapless defense of the flawed segment on President Bush's National Guard service. Howard has also indicated to colleagues that he...

In January 2002, As U.S. Forces in Afghanistan were hunting down Al Qaeda suspects, the CBS news show 60 Minutes II got its hands on some sensational footage: seven hours’ worth of videotape showing Al Qaeda terrorists training in an Afghan camp. The source of the tapes, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema—known familiarly as Keith—was more than a little dubious. Idema claimed to be working as an adviser to the Northern Alliance, but he was also an ex-con who had served three years in federal prison for wire fraud and had a criminal record in...

Wednesday, January 19, 2005 By ROBERT L. JAMIESON JR. SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST President Bush takes the oath of office for the second time tomorrow. When he raises his right hand, I will be thinking about the relationship between top people in power and messengers who have something to say about them. I'll have journalist Mary Mapes in mind. Mapes grew up in Western Washington -- in the Skagit Valley -- to a bloodline of strawberry farmers who believed in doing the right thing. Her kin helped maintain a Japanese American family's Mount Vernon-area farm during World War II after Japanese...

At CBS News the long awaited "memogate" report is in and four people are out of a job. Is this one of the biggest scandals ever to hit American journalism? Did the report go far enough? And what about the recommendations made by the independent panel investigating the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story about President Bush's National Guard service? Our panelists will weigh in on those questions and much more! Then, in our "Quick Takes on the Media" segment: • What was the real reason for the massive media coverage of the South Asian tsunami? • Should a reaction to a...

NEW YORK (APUPI) After several months, many thousands of legal hours billed, and several barrels of latte consumed, the independent report on CBS' flawed reporting of the Emperor's new clothes has been released, to the relief of network executives who feared much worse. While several producers have been asked to resign, Dan Rather will continue to report on Imperial fashion, and the report verified that the story may still have been fake, but accurate. The network had previously reported that the Emperor had a new wardrobe, and provided footage of him walking down the street in it, waving to the...

AFTER SPENDING THREE MONTHS ON an investigation that must have rung up hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable hours, the team of lawyers hired by CBS to investigate its scandalously spurious report about George W. Bush's long-ago National Guard service finally concluded last week that CBS shouldn't have aired the September 8 broadcast at all. Former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief Louis D. Boccardi, who led the investigative panel, declared that there had simply been too many questions about the veracity of the supposedly bombshell documents on which it relied. (Cont.)

True, pro-Bush bloggers may have been more suspicious than those who think Bush spends his days leashed and curled at Karl Rove's feet -- but they were right, and that's what counted in the end. If partisanship made some unusually suspicious, might it also have made others unduly credulous? Naaah. There's no evidence the critics were right, you know. The CBS report can't bring itself, even now, to say the documents were unquestionably bogus. Rather himself told the investigating panel that "no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic." This is like floating in the North...

Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media (AIM), commented that, "Rather's reference to Abu Ghraib, in the context of preparing the bogus attack on Bush, demonstrates that the agenda of Rather and CBS was not only to sabotage Bush's re-election campaign but to undermine the war in Iraq. They were looking for 'big' stories to hurt the U.S. at home and abroad. The Abu Ghraib story on CBS inflamed the Arab/Muslim world against the U.S., inevitably costing the lives of more American soldiers in Iraq at the hands of fanatical Muslim terrorists." AIM and Romerstein drew attention to another bombshell...

No political bias – none at all. So says the independent panel that CBS News asked to find out what went wrong with its infamous 60 Minutes broadcast concerning George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. "The panel," says its 224-page report, "cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes drove the ... segment." Why not? Certainly the panel could have drawn that conclusion had it uncovered "smoking gun" evidence – such as an anti-Bush or pro-John Kerry e-mail written by, say, the producer, Mary Mapes. Or if it had found evidence of an agenda in...

CBS News is undoubtedly hoping that release of the Thornburgh/Boccardi Report, with its embarrassing admissions, will satisfy critics enough that the Rathergate scandal will be allowed to disappear into dim memory. They are wrong. Many observers, our own Clarice Feldman included, have been impressed by the extent of the incompetence (and worse) CBS has admitted with this internal report. Some, like Jim Geraghty, of National review Online, are concerned that critics of CBS should appear reasonable, and praise what is praiseworthy, while asking for more information, as a matter of political strategy. Already, Washington Post writers Howard Kurtz and Dana...

MIDI - MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB - click on the site and scroll down for the MIDI file Mary Mapes is going to, going to, going to Mary Mapes is going to the unemployment line She had tried to get George Bush, get George Bush, get George Bush She had tried to get George Bush but things have turned out fine