Text 5138, 112 rader
Skriven 2007-09-27 15:03:00 av TIM RICHARDSON
Ärende: Dan Rathergate!
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Dan Rather, in Shameless Denial


By Brent Bozell III


Wednesday, September 26, 2007


When the news broke that Dan Rather was suing CBS News for $70 million for
somehow destroying his reputation, the most noticeable reaction came from the
media establishment itself. From the first story in The New York Times, it
carried a different tone between the lines of the breaking news. Rather's
former colleagues think he's lost his marbles.


The Times story by Jacques Steinberg said Rather's career came to an
"inglorious end" and now he's taking "vehement issue" with CBS's soft-scrub
internal investigation. Rather claimed "to be reduced to little more than a
patsy" in the story and now works for an "obscure cable channel." The
implication between the lines? Gunga Dan's picked one battle too many.


Almost no one outside the vast expanse of Dan Rather's ego thinks this
lawsuit is a good idea either for CBS or for Rather. Even people who were
fired for helping him produce the despicable phony-document stunt against
President Bush in 2004 said he had gone off the "deep end" by portraying
himself as a clueless narrator who was too busy covering Bill Clinton's heart
problems to obsess over George Bush's National Guard records. Contrary to
Rather's insistence that he was a patsy, his co-workers said he pressed hard
on the story, chewing over every line.


The legal brief itself was Rather's ego on parade, right from the first lines
introducing the plaintiff as "Dan Rather, one of the foremost broadcast
journalists of our time." He was the earnest Uncle Sam of journalistic
integrity: "Throughout his career, Mr. Rather has promoted, championed, and
been emblematic of journalistic independence and journalistic freedom from
extraneous interference." Vanity, thy name is Rather.


Rather added to that hootenanny of chutzpah by appearing on CNN's "Larry King
Live" to declare, "We have to somehow get back to integrity in the news."

Next we'll hear Bill Clinton on that network promoting abstinence.


In Rather's fevered brain, he is the populist against Big Corporations and
Big Government in collusion, a vast right-wing conspiracy on steroids. He is
the idealist in the middle of an Oliver Stone movie who keeps the red,
beating heart of democracy alive. He declared at the top of the Larry King
show that he sued CBS because "somebody, some time has got to take a stand
and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive" in the current era of
corporate-government collusion.


Rather was not the victim of this episode. The wronged man in this story was
President George Bush. Before you even engage Rather on his so-called "facts"
in his disgraced story, there was at its very beginnings a glaring partisan
double standard. Dan Rather never demonstrated an investigative journalist's
ardor to explore the draft records of Bill Clinton, but Rather and his
enabler Mary Mapes dove into Bush's records. He went after Bush's military
record during the 2004 campaign, but had no time to investigate the scandal
surrounding Kerry's Vietnam record.


Democracy is not synonymous with whatever hatchet job Dan Rather bravely
pursues, but with each citizen's input in the electoral process. The bloggers
and reporters who picked Rather's story apart? That was democracy in action,
too. Even the liberal media quickly discovered in their probes that CBS had
no checks or balances in their one-sided war on Bush, and rightly denounced
them.


That was also a free press doing its job.


What CBS put on the air in September 2004 was not "independent" journalism --
it was partisan hackwork, dependent on Bush-hating Democrats to secure the
phony documents. Mapes was pressed to put her document-leaker in contact with
the Kerry campaign in a quid pro quo for the allegedly important papers. In
the end, the proper I-word for Rather's journalism on this story isn't
"independent," it's "indefensible."


Dan Rather does have prominent defenders who are as loopy as he is. Rosie
O'Donnell wrote Rather one of her trademark lower-case poems: "it has to
shift / dan rather / saying there is a man behind the curtain / that he will
not pretend / at one time being a journalist meant something / when we had a
free press in this country."


On the Bill Maher show on HBO, leftist comedienne Janeane Garofalo gave Dan
her support: "I have no doubt that there were executives at CBS that folded
under right-wing coercion. ... It doesn't seem like it's a democracy at all
when you let that happen."


Garofalo is a pitch-perfect Rather ally, a woman who took to the
little-watched MSNBC network and proclaimed President Bush was "unelectable,
in my opinion" -- on the night of his second inauguration.


The Rather Fan Club requires its members to be just like their idol -- in
complete denial.




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*Durango b301 #PE* "And take that tagline somewhere else." ......Dan Ceppa
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