Free Republic

On CNN on Tuesday, former CBS "Evening News" anchor Dan Rather was asked about President Barack Obama's critics complaining he is not using his influence around the world to quell ongoing international crises.

Original Title:Here’s What CBS Had to Say in Response to Sharyl Attkisson’s Claims About Network’s Reporting Bias CBS News on Monday responded to its former employee Sharyl Attkisson’s claims that the network indirectly discouraged her from doing investigative reporting critical of the Obama administration. Attkisson reported extensively on Benghazi and the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal. The ex-CBS reporter later revealed that she didn’t run into the same roadblocks while reporting on issues that hurt former President George W. Bush. She blamed a lot of the bias problems on special and corporate interests. n response to Attkisson’s public comments, CBS...

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is no closer to being found as the disappearance of the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people nears its two-week mark. Pilot suicide, terrorism and hijacking are some possibilities that are being theorized to the plane as the search area expanded to 7 million square miles. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said last week that “there are a number of possible scenarios that are being investigated as to what happened to the flight.” Rick Mathews, of the National Center for Security & Preparedness at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy of SUNY Albany, tells...

Russia has been showing the world glistening scenes of the Winter Olympics. It's a rare opportunity to brighten a national image that often skates on the thin ice of corruption. One authority estimates that 20 percent of the Russian economy is skimmed by graft and a lot of that by government officials. It may be that no one knows more about this than American-born businessman Bill Browder. Browder tells a story of thievery, vengeance and death worthy of a Russian novel. He's a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin and he has torn a rift between Moscow and Washington....

Former CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather, despite being fired as a result of the bogus story, continues to maintain that he got it right in September 2004 when he aired forged documents concerning George W. Bush’s record with the Air National Guard. On CNN’s Piers Morgan Live Monday, Rather said, “No question the story was true” (video follows with transcript and commentary): [video] PIERS MORGAN, HOST: Let's turn quickly to what’s been going on at CBS, your old network. Your former colleague, Lara Logan, on leave of absence over this report from Benghazi. Many people believe there’s a slight...

"The fact of the matter is, the president went out and said, I think he said what he believed to be the fact and what was substantially was the fact, because 90, whatever, 95, 96, 97 percent of Americans are in the position where they can keep the insurance they have and they're going to see no changes," Axelrod explained to MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Monday night. Axelrod dismissed people currently losing their health plans as a "small group" of people who bought "substandard policies" in the individual market.

-snip- 24. Power Line From practically the day they sprang into existence, blogs have been denigrated as trivial, inaccurate, and derivative. Untrained writers could never match the accuracy and depth of newspapers and network news. Power Line, a scrappy right-wing blog, turned that perception on its ear when it took down one of old media’s most venerable figures: Dan Rather. In September 2004, Rather and CBS News aired an explosive story about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. The report used military documents to show that Bush had received preferential treatment and performed poorly while failing...

Dan Rather, discredited CBS journalist, has weighed in on the recent scandals facing the Obama administration. He stated that the "controversies" are not in the same "cosmos" of Watergate. “Those who compare it to Watergate, the Republicans, are always eager to jump on almost anything and say, ‘Well, it’s like Watergate,’” Rather said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We’re not anywhere in the same cosmos as that. Keep in mind, with Watergate, while using the Internal Revenue Service to punish one’s opponents came directly from the president himself. That’s a fact. Now, in this case, we don’t even know whether the...

Well, not intentionally. But Jim Ragsdale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune attended a conference in Chicago on covering gun issues, which he describes this way: “Covering Guns” brought reporters with front-line experience covering mass shootings in Tucson, Ariz.; Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn., and Red Lake, Minn., to meet with gun experts and advocates and gun trainers. Sponsored by the Poynter journalism center and funded by the McCormick Foundation of Chicago, we gathered in a city that witnessed 506 homicides last year. The idea, I take it, was to educate reporters so they could do a better job of covering news...

In a new report released today, the Republican National Committee owned up to a number of mistakes made during the 2012 election cycle. While the central party admitted there were too many presidential debates, it only barely touched on the role that unfair media moderators played in both the nominating process and in the general election. Despite its reluctance to criticize media impartiality, the RNC report did open the door to the creation of a new organization that would be assigned to create and host the debates apart from the media. “We are intrigued with the suggestion some have made...

ANALYSIS: Two days before the election, CBS posted additional portions of a Sept. 12 "60 Minutes" interview where President Obama seems to contradict himself on the Benghazi attack. As the Benghazi investigation gets more attention and focus, CBS is once again adding to the Benghazi timeline. In the interview, according to the latest portions, Obama would not say whether he thought the attack was terrorism. Yet he would later emphasize at a presidential debate that in the Rose Garden the same day, he had declared the attack an act of terror. That moment was one of the most intense exchanges...

Disgraced ex-CBS anchor Dan Rather delved into conspiracy theories on Monday, speculating that the Ohio Republican Party could steal the election for Mitt Romney. In a Facebook posting for Dan Rather Reports, the journalist hyped, "The whole upper tier of Ohio state government is in the hands of the GOP now; in very close voting they have the power to influence what votes are counted and how." Linking back to other conspiracy theories, Rather reminded, "Remember Ohio, Bush v. Kerry in 2004 and Florida, Bush v. Gore in 2000)." The former CBS Evening News host seemed to be echoing the...

She got it wrong. She interfered. She took a side. Candy Crowley may finally have done something else as well: so visibly tipping the scales of media bias that the end result makes Mitt Romney the next president. Taken all together, CNN's Candy Crowley, in her zeal to intrude on the presidential debate and save President Obama from himself, may just have provided the televised moment that finally sparks a revolt against the four years of fawning coverage of President Obama. Becoming to the liberal media what the Tet Offensive was to Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. For four...

I went to Hulu and watched the SNL skit of the Obama/Romney debate. They made Romney into the unlikable person, made him say the most outrageously false statements such as he killed Osama bin Laden (Romney lied-straight out of the DNC talking points), and even had Obama being excused for his performance because he was thinking about what gift to get to his wife on their anniversary (such a romantic fellow!) and SNL even made a centerpiece of Al Gore's buffoonish excuse that Obama was affected by the altitude. I just turned off SNL after I watched their skit on...

"I've been covering politics since way before Tim Tebow was born," Dan Rather, the disgraced former anchor for CBS' "Evening News" said on the Monday night broadcast of MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow" program. "But these things unfold as time goes on. And while right now Ryan looks like he is toxic for the ticket, it could be as we get deeper in the campaign, that this intelligent man, he is intelligent and serious man, will show something that people do not now see." "In the early going, in the early going, Ryan damages the ticket because rightly or wrongly, he's perceived...

Incredible. CBS News has an anti-Romney "fact check" article up this morning supposedly debunking statements made by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan during yesterday's introduction of the veep pick. At the end, CBS actually snuck in the hyper-partisan, DNC-talking-point assertion that it was "clear" that when President Obama utttered his infamous "you didn't build that," he was talking about "teachers and infrastructure." CBS claims that in criticizing "you didn't build that," Republicans "seized on only part of Obama's quote." In fact, it is CBS itself that edited out another, most telling, part of Obama's comments. The network omitted the following...

Don't underestimate Newt Gingrich, warns Dan Rather during an MSNBC roundtable discussion today. "Anyone who has covered Newt Gingrich over the years knows better than to underestimate him," said Rather, referencing his political comeback. "Newt Gingrich on the move politically is as dangerous as a wounded wolverine." Rather added that Jon Huntsman was the best candidate for the GOP in the 2012 general election, but would have a hard time winning the Republican primary.

You might think the British press holds a monopoly on media controversy this month, with the shuttering of a 168-year-old tabloid over a phone-hacking scandal. Still, at least one Yank media concern has won recent unwelcome notoriety--fittingly enough, for airing misleading video footage on the national holiday commemorating American independence from the British crown. CBS has been caught doctoring Fourth of July footage after Bostonians realized Thursday that the network's images of fireworks over various city landmarks were not only breathtaking, but also fake. An area research scientist appears to have been among the first to point out the discrepancy...

That’s what Jim Rendon asks in his piece about Dan Rather and his work on HDNet. Owner Mark Cuban has made little effort to extend Rather’s reach, he writes. New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter hasn’t written about Rather’s show since it first launched because HDNet has never “flagged one of his big stories for me effectively.” See here the article in Mother Jones magazine. http://motherjones.com/media/2011/02/dan-rather-reports-mark-cuban-hd-net?page=1 Dan Rather: Inside Mark Cuban's Gilded Cage At 79, the former CBS anchorman is still kicking ass and winning Emmys. But with his exposés sandwiched between pro wrestling and Girls Gone Wild, is...

Conservative activist James O'Keefe, whose deceptively edited hidden camera videos have made him a star on the right, is out with a new video targeting National Public Radio executive Ron Schiller - and by extension NPR itself. The video purports to show Schiller speaking to a pair of men posing as representatives of a phony Muslim group called seeking to give $5 million to NPR. The men tell Schiller they are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political movement. It shows Schiller stating that the Republican Party and the Tea Party is "fanatically involved in people's personal lives and...