Free Republic

Helen Thomas simply longs for the days when reporters and pundits could report spin, lies and opinion as fact and were never held accountable outside of page A-16 retractions. The new media’s finest moment came when in 2004 CBS’s Dan Rather attempted to influence a national election (much like his predecessor Walter Cronkite did with the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive), but unlike then, now there is a new media filled with grassroots activists who were going to hold the old media accountable and one of those activists on the Conservative Site Free-Republic under the handle “Buckhead,” was able...

Reporting from New York - Dan Rather's protracted legal fight with CBS ended Tuesday when New York state's highest court declined to hear the anchor's motion to reinstate his $70-million lawsuit against his longtime employer. Rather was hoping the court would breathe new life into his suit alleging breach of contract and fraud against CBS that a state appellate court had dismissed in September. But the Court of Appeals denied Rather's motion without comment

<p>"The scandal at CBS involved the use of phony documents to make charges against President Bush regarding his Air National Guard service that were not only unsubstantiated, but contradicted by evidence and information known to CBS at the time."</p> <p>In memory of Reed Irvine, founder of Accuracy in Media, AIM is awarding its first annual Reed Irvine Investigative Journalism award to two of the bloggers responsible for exposing Rathergate—Dan Rather's use of forged documents to smear President Bush. This episode was a milestone in the history of journalism.</p>

October 5, 2005 -- THE producer at the center of last year's "Memogate" scandal at CBS News says she was derailed by a vast right-wing conspiracy. The producer, Mary Mapes, is one of four CBS staffers fired last January in the wake of the scandal. She is convinced she was the victim of a group of loosely associated Internet bloggers "with a harsh political bent" who pounced on CBS News minutes after the airing of the now-infamous Texas Air National Guard story on "60 Minutes 2" in September 2004... "Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Websites I had...

Today is September 9, the first anniversary of "Rathergate." It was at 7:51 on the morning of Sept. 9, 2004, that Scott hit the "save" button on the original version of "The Sixty-First Minute", which discussed the 60 Minutes program on President Bush's National Guard service that had aired the previous evening, along with the DNC's advertising campaign on the same subject that was beginning on the morning of Sept. 9. At the end of his post--now the most famous post in the young history of the blogosphere--Scott included a quote and a link to a Free Republic post by...

I hate vanities, but I thought that today and last night deserved recognition for being the one year anniversary of TankerKC and Buckhead blowing the CBS ANG document story out of the water. As we all know, this ultimately led to the disgracing of Dan Rather and rapidly advanced the already slow-moving demise of the MSM as a monopoly.

Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used...

Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired for her role in Memogate, has come out with her new book, Truth and Duty : The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power. In it she mentions some encouraging words from Dan Rather, offering his support for her in her darkest hour. I knew I could count on Dan. In tough situations, he became “fightin’ Dan,” someone who told us all to “never back up, never back down, never give up, never give in.” I was glad to hear from him and reassured by his reaction to all of it. Dan...

RUSH: I want to now go to these Dan Rather sound bites. Dan Rather was interviewed last night at the National Press Club in Washington by former CBS News employee-reporter Marvin Kalb. Marvin Kalb now runs the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center at Harvard, and you know something? When you hear these bites you're going to understand what I'm saying here. This is one of the problems of the mainstream media today. When these reporters that get long in the tooth get laid off or retired, they farm them out to these think tanks and these journalism...

<p>Congratulations to all those nominated! The slate was very stiff this year and we're sure it was a tough call for all voters. We will be contacting all winners and you can help speed up this process by dropping a FReepmail to "Bob J" and giving him your contact information! Please let us know if you will be at the FR Ball!</p>

Not to diminish the efforts of Buckhead and the rest of the excellent researchers who brought this to a head, but TankerKC was the first to mention potential problems with the SeeBS memos at 8:19, post number 107, in this thread. Credit where credit is due.

Envy, an emotion we all face from time to time, is defined as “a feeling of discontent and resentment aroused by and in conjunction with desire for the possessions or qualities of another.” As long as other people have more of what we want – material possessions, influence, charm, good looks, business acumen, etc., the old green-eyed monster lurks. While most of us try to keep envy in check, some display it in newspapers like the Star Tribune for all to see. In a most vulgar display of blog, class and “male appendage” envy, Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman had...

Blog-Gate Yes, CBS screwed up badly in ‘Memogate’ — but so did those who covered the affair By Corey Pein “The drama began when CBS posted forged National Guard documents on its Web site and, that same evening, an attentive ‘Freeper’ (a regular at the conservative FreeRepublic.com Internet site) named Buckhead raised suspicion of fraud. From there, intrepid bloggers Powerlineblog.com and Little Green Footballs, the Woodward and Bernstein of Rathergate, began to document the mounting signs of forgery.” — Chris Weinkopf in The American Enterprise Online “The yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took [CBS’s 60...

Earlier this year, CBS aired a now-infamous 60 Minutes episode in which Rather presented typed memoranda supposedly written over 30 years ago by President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard commander, the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. The documents purported to show that Bush received preferential treatment while serving in the military. Hours after the broadcast, well-known bloggers like Little Green Footballs, Power Line, and the widely known Instapundit — as well as NRO's Kerry Spot & The Corner — were casting doubt on the documents’ authenticity. As the controversy grew, they posted frequent updates and became virtual...

In the interest of the historical importance of things that happened on this forum last week and, most importantly, to try to provide and document an accurate record of exactly what happened here on the evening of September 8, 2004, and the following morning, I have compiled a listing of ALL of the postings that occurred on Free Republic concerning CBS and Dan Rather 60 Minutes show from 8:00 PM EDT on Thurdsay, September 8, 2004, up until about 9:00 AM EDT on the morning of Friday, September 9, 2004, when the rest of the internet "caught up." I am...