Dan Rather had a very big career in TV journalism, but he ended it in embarrassment and disgrace. It is clear to any reasonable observer that Rather himself was to blame. That is the conclusion that CBS came to. But now he is back, suing CBS for $70 million smackers for making him a fall guy. We find out that he is doing it all for us.
Former CBS anchor Dan Rather is vowing an aggressive pursuit of his $70-million lawsuit against the network, saying he's determined to get his former bosses under oath and prove that they caved to government pressure in forcing his ouster.
S0 it's all about Dan standing up for democracy against corporations, and government pressure? Maybe, but it's sure all about Dan. Here is someone with a wounded ego that few mortals can imagine, and a capacity for self-deception to match.
The bottom fell out for him when it was revealed that a Sixty Minutes II story in 2004, clearly intended to embarrass President Bush on the eve of the election, was based on fraudulent documents produced by two bit political hack. Here is what I wrote at the time in the American News.
The documents that Dan Rather relied on were in fact forgeries, produced not on a typewriter but on a personal computer, using Microsoft Word. Two days after the broadcast everyone with an internet connection knew this. It would take CBS another agonizing week to not quite come clean. They tried to pass off as experts a man who analyzed the spiritual content of handwriting and a typewriter repairman. But Rather now admits that the memos “cannot be authenticated.” That’s like saying that the papier mache goblin under glass at the county fair might not really be the Devil.
This was one of the biggest stories of the year, but not because of the content. It was big because it the new media (the blogosphere) first demonstrated its power by rapidly exposing the CBS story as a canard. Powerline, the Twin Cities based conservative blog, broke the story and so achieved national stature.
The fact that Mr. Rather wants to relive all of this suggests what he has been brooding on since Powerline pulled his shorts down. It also reminds us some interesting things about the human soul. In my column I indulged in a little amateur psychoanalysis.
Its not hard to see why Rather and his news crew hung on so long. The victims of con jobs will often insist for years afterward that their mysterious partners were really honest men, and that they will show up any day now with the prize money. Having invested himself in the story, and CBS its prestige, they were loath to admit they’d been suckered. Nor is it difficult to see why they were easy marks in the first place. People get conned because they are greedy. CBS News, struggling in the ratings game, was greedy for a big story. But they were greedy for something else.
Rather and his news team were virtually coordinating their work with the Kerry campaign. They were greedy for a Kerry victory, and the problem with that is not so much its partisanship as the fact that it corrupted their professional judgment.
Jonah Goldberg at the National Review has this:
In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why ... why ... why? “There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.” Well, God has not forsaken us.
I will leave God's decency and justice to rest on the merits, but God has surely been good to Goldberg, and to me, for inviting us to revisit this delicious chapter in political history.
Recent Comments