And while we’re discussing the First Amendment

September 20th, 2007

… and freedom of speech, as appropriate for Constitution Week … I’m THRILLED to bits with Dan Rather’s law suit; and lets take this as a “sign o’ the times” that he’s pursuing it now, as the Bush regime wobbles on its pins and the public looks with a fresh eye at their Decider. With all this Saint Petraeus and Commander-in-Chief crap going on, reminding the nation that George was a big fat no-show seems timely indeed! Let’s re-open this can of worms and let them crawl right into the public eye.

I’ve read some “oh, poor, poor Dan, better get a life,” and “he’s all washed up, its so sad,” commentary on some of the blogs — well, they can just bite me! Let’s remember that this guys career was swiftboated by NeoCon hit men.

I’m so tired of the “cult of personality” and some dweeb somewhere deciding what’s important to my daily information gathering. Injustice is injustice — we don’t have to add to it with this kind of cavalier snottiness! We love/hate our public figures — we’re obsessed with Britney and Paris and whoever’s opening their mouth lately on The View, and we can hardly wait ’til they make a misstep … which they always do, allowing us to pounce on them with glee. Message is cold as ice: You’ve got fifteen minutes in the spotlight and you’d BETTER be iron-clad or you’ll end up mush. It’s a kind of cynical sickness, this voyeuristic bash-fest we indulge ourselves in.

Dan Rather has had more than 15 minutes in the spotlight — he’s had a lifetime of good dependable work. Just think of what evening news used to be — people like Murrow, Huntley, Brinkley, Cronkite, Brokow, Jennings … Rather.

Now CBS has Katie — you impressed? You WATCH?? The numbers tell us few do. Just another bad call by CBS, and mainstream media as a whole.

As regards Dan Rather’s report to the nation that landed him in hot water — the number of reports less credible in the last five years could fill a spiral-bound; Rather paid the price, and had his name turned into a verb. May his law suit be profitable … and Dubby’s record be exposed. General Dave isn’t the ONLY “ass-kissing little chicken-shit” in the public eye, raised up on a pedestal and surrounded by smoke and mirrors!

FYI, here’s a link from the 2004 archives — “regarding Dan and the hysteria;” these posts are a little distracting, the formatting is off — but the reads are still the reads.

NOTE: off topic [of Rather, but good news for the Liberals and the First Amendment] Paul Krugman has a new blog, you’ll find it here; it comes along as the NY Times scraps its “premium” service, so now you can feel free to read the opinions and whatnot whenever you’d like.

Jude

Rather’s Lawsuit Says CBS Made Him a ‘Scapegoat’
JACQUES STEINBERG, NYT
September 20, 2007

Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.

The suit, which seeks $70 million in damages, names as defendants CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its executive chairman, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”

He also continues to take vehement issue with the appointment by CBS of Richard Thornburgh, an attorney general in the administration of the elder President Bush, as one of the two outside panelists given the job of reviewing how the disputed broadcast had been prepared.

In a statement CBS said, “These complaints are old news and this lawsuit is without merit.” Mr. Heyward said he would not comment beyond the CBS statement. A Viacom spokesman said he had no comment.

For both Mr. Rather and CBS, the filing of the suit threatens to once again focus attention on one of the darker chapters in the history of the network and its storied news division, at a moment when it is already reeling. Mr. Rather’s permanent successor as evening news anchor, Katie Couric, has languished in third place in the network news ratings since taking over the broadcast a year ago, behind not only Charles Gibson of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC, but also the ratings performance of the “CBS Evening News” in Mr. Rather’s final years.

The portrait of Mr. Rather that emerges from the 32-page filing bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, seemingly fearless anchor who for two decades shared the stage with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings as the most watched and recognizable journalists in America.

By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast, which was shown on Sept. 8, 2004, on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” and which purported to offer new evidence of preferential treatment given to Mr. Bush when he was a lieutenant in the Air National Guard.

Instead of directly vetting the script he would read for the Guard segment, Mr. Rather says, he acceded to pressure from Mr. Heyward to focus instead on his reporting from Florida on Hurricane Frances, and on Bill Clinton’s heart surgery.

Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS — and later the outside panel it commissioned — concluded that the report was based on documents that could not be authenticated.

Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 — written not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist — “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

He now leads a weekly news program on HDNet — an obscure cable channel in which he is seen by only a small fraction of the millions of viewers who once turned to him in his heyday to receive the news of the day.

In filing his suit now — three years after the now-disputed report was first broadcast, and more than a year after he reluctantly left CBS, as his last contract wound down — Mr. Rather is following, by a matter of weeks, the announcement by CBS that it had settled a similar lawsuit by Don Imus.

Mr. Imus had sued CBS over his firing in the aftermath of derogatory remarks he made about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. While some Imus associates suggested last month that his final payment was at least $20 million, CBS Radio has characterized that figure as too high.

Mr. Rather’s suit seeks $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

Among the pivotal points of contention in Mr. Rather’s suit are the definitions of the words “full-time” and “regular.” As quoted in the filing, Mr. Rather’s contract — which he signed in 2002, and which called for him to be paid a base salary of $6 million a year as anchor — entitled him to a job as a “full-time correspondent” with “first billing” on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes,” should he leave the anchor chair before March 2006, his 25th anniversary in the job.

As it turned out, Mr. Rather would leave the anchor chair a year early, and would indeed be reassigned to the midweek edition, known as “60 Minutes II.” When that broadcast was canceled a few months later, Mr. Rather’s contract called for him to be reassigned to the main “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday evening, where he would “perform services on a regular basis as a correspondent.”

Over the next year, Mr. Rather would have eight segments broadcast on the main “60 Minutes” — including reports that took him to North Korea, China and Beirut. While that would seem to be a substantial portfolio of work, Mr. Rather notes that other correspondents had more than twice as many reports appear on the program during the same period, and that several of his reports had been effectively buried, broadcast on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day when far fewer people than usual were likely to tune in.

“He was provided with very little staff support, very few of his suggested stories were approved, editing services were denied to him, and the broadcast of the few stories he was permitted to do was delayed and then played on carefully selected evenings, when low viewership was anticipated,” the filing contends.

Among the most egregious indignities he suffered, Mr. Rather says, was the network’s response to his request to be sent as a correspondent to the scene of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005.

“Mr. Rather is the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes,” his lawyers write in the suit. “CBS refused to send him,” thus “furthering its desire to keep Mr. Rather off the air.” ++

My Role in Rathergate
James Moore, HuffPo
September 20, 2007

Okay, I’m tired of talking about this. But it needs clarification one more time.

When I was doing research on George W. Bush’s close encounter with the Texas Air National Guard, I kept getting directed to a former guard officer named Bill Burkett.

According to numerous people in the Texas Guard, Burkett had a story that needed to be told and also he was credible. I called him and he related the now infamous tale of witnessing a Guard employee scrubbing the president’s service record files to hide his poor performance and possible grounding as a pilot. Burkett also claimed to have overhead a speakerphone conversation with the commander of the Texas Guard and Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s gubernatorial chief of staff, as they discussed “cleaning up Bush’s files.”

I began looking into Bush’s Guard history in 1994 after I asked him a question about it as a panelist during a live televised gubernatorial debate he had with Ann Richards. The question of how he got into the Guard seemed relevant to me because it spoke to questions of privilege. A lot of young men in my generation were trying to sign up for the Guard to avoid combat in Vietnam and we were consistently told of waiting lists 2-5 years in length.

Bush, however, seemingly walked up and got a coveted slot as a pilot. Taxpayers spent almost a million dollars training him to fly jets even though there were hundreds of pilots home from Southeast Asia who would have jumped at the chance to fill the slot and keep their certificates current.

I received 161 pages of FOIA documents on Bush’s service from a third party. None of them offered much detail regarding his service. Sources kept referring me to Burkett. His story needed witnesses. He gave me the name of a colleague he said was with him at the time he witnessed the scrubbing at Camp Mabry in Austin and I contacted him via email.

The man (his name has been widely-reported by me and others and I see no reason to further complicate his life here) did not directly confirm Burkett’s details of the scrubbing but said the Texas officer was “an honorable and honest man” and that when he spoke he “told the truth.” This individual was at that time a civilian employee of the U.S. military in Europe. He later changed his story, and there are any number of obvious causes for that decision.

During the course of several conversations with Bill Burkett, on the telephone and in person, the retired Guardsmen seemed credible and not likely to make up a fanciful story. I checked with several people about his reputation, and even the commander of the Texas Guard, Gen. Danny James, spoke glowingly of Burkett. However, Burkett clearly despised the president and leaders of the Texas National Guard because of a dispute over his health care benefits. Burkett said he had fallen ill when assigned to Panama to help the U.S. Army close down a fort and had been denied health care when he was no longer able to work. Guard and Army officials disputed his story.

The central piece missing from the Bush Guard file was a document that might show he had been grounded for drug or alcohol abuse. The records make clear he stopped flying but there is no evidence as to why. If he had been grounded for disciplinary reasons, there would have been an investigatory board to hear evidence and file a report. That either never happened or the document has been removed from the file.

The other reporter as intensely interested in Bush and his Guard time as I have been was Mary Mapes, Dan Rather’s producer. For a number of years, Mary had been trying to get former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes to talk about how he helped Bush get his coveted pilot’s spot in the Guard. Barnes demurred until Bush’s reelection campaign and by then his confession sounded like political expediency. Mary understood, however, as did Bill Burkett and any other investigator looking at Bush and the Guard that anything Barnes might say was going to be considered largely political without supporting documentation.
Mary called me and asked me what I thought of Burkett as a source and I told her I thought he was credible and I was inclined to believe what he told me but I wanted documentation.

Eventually, Burkett told me what sounded like a fanciful story of an unnamed man delivering an envelope to him while he was at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. This envelope supposedly included incriminating documents related to the president’s Guard record. Whether these are the same documents he provided Mary Mapes, I cannot say. I do know that Burkett and several of his confidantes were as determined as I was to get at the truth about the president’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. I don’t know whether they were willing to go so far as to create false documents that they were confident existed at one time but no longer did, but I doubt that. Nonetheless, Burkett provided Mary Mapes with incriminating memos that were supposedly written by the president’s commander during his days in the Guard.

One of the characteristics of the memos, which were immediately jumped on by right wing bloggers, was the appearance of superscript. This is the lower case abbreviation that often follows numerical designations like 5th or 3rd. According to the critics of the memos, superscript did not exist on IBM typewriters at the time the memos were supposedly written. Several researchers reported otherwise, however, that at least one model, the IBM Executive II was moving into the marketplace and had superscript available by using the “shift” key.

As the controversy over the Guard increased during the 2004 campaign, the White House began a series of Friday night document dumps, claiming they had discovered new material related to the president’s Guard service. Although I was originally told there were only 161 pages, the final number was more than 300. The last document dump occurred about a week after Dan Rather’s apologia on his former network’s newscast. This was a single page memo promoting 2nd Lt. George W. Bush to 1st Lt. and it used superscript. The media took no notice that this piece of evidence completely contradicted the most powerful criticism of the Rathergate memos.

If Dan Rather and Mary Mapes made a mistake, it was to take Bill Burkett at his word. He told them his source for the memos they had in their possession was in the Texas National Guard. Although from the outside it looks as if Mapes was unable to confirm that claim, the memos became the central evidence to Rather’s on-air report that Bush had gotten into a bit of trouble while serving. When forensic experts said the memos looked fake, Rather went back and confronted Burkett on camera and the former Guardsman acknowledged that he had not told the truth about the source of the memos because he was trying to protect someone. From that point forward, Mapes’ tenure as an award-winning producer was fated to end and Rather, in spite of his long and successful career, was placed in an untenable situation. CBS was under huge economic and political pressure for being perceived as a “liberal” institution and there seemed little doubt management had been given an opportunity to move Rather out of the way, bring in a new face, and curry favor with the White House.

Unfortunately, for those of us interested in the truth, the Bush-Guard story has taken on the cultural manifestations of the Kennedy assassination. The facts, even if spoken now by those directly involved, will be disputed. Political disinformation entered the process along with too much zeal to break the big story. Rather and Mapes, however, seem unfairly condemned to me. The report by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh’s investigative committee seemed cursory and inconclusive. I was among a number of people directly involved who were never contacted, which leads to the inevitable suggestion other pieces of evidence were ignored to fit a preferred conclusion.

Ultimately, though, we have to rely on perception of this matter because we’ll never get the facts from the Bush administration. They do, however, exist. Every document relevant to the Bush time in the Guard should be included on a microfiche filed at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Any historian, journalist, or amateur researcher could have access to the truth if the president simply signed a release allowing those pages to be printed and distributed. It’s what John McCain did in 2000 when Karl Rove started circulating rumors that the senator suffered from mental problems after being held for years as a prisoner of war. Why won’t the president offer a similar release of his records? The answer, of course, is too obvious to bother stating.

And it is not hard to believe, after six years of lying and spying and withholding evidence from Congress, that the Bush team is taking the same approach to hiding the truth about the young Lt. George W. Bush. ++

Hey Dan Rather, Thanks for Being Mad As Hell And Not Taking It Anymore
Russell Shaw, HuffPo
September 19, 2007

Somewhere, the ghost of Edward R. Murrow is smiling. And if the classic Network’s Howard Beale was real, he would be going heh-heh.

I say this in response to Dan Rather’s $70 million suit against CBS-owning Viacom, their chickenshit cowardice and their knife-twisting betraying ways.

Perhaps Rather’s report on GW Bush not being the most diligent National Guard soldier was not all that airtight. Yet for daring to report leads in that area, Rather was marginalized by CBS and Viacom’s Sumner Redstone.

Listen, Sumner Redstone. When you were running movie theaters back in the 1970s, Dan Rather was a distinguished reporter and anchor trusted by tens of millions of Americans. How dare you approve Rather’s marginalization?

And to make matters worse, CBS’ chief Les Moonves had the unmitigated gall to further diminish your reporting responsibilities at the same time he publicly wooed and then signed celebrity ass-kisser Katie Couric to take over the seat you — and Cronkite, and Murrow — so distinguishably occupied.

Now, Couric’s ratings are in the tank, and Rather is standing up, battling the entertainment-focused corporation that has done him wrong in more than one way.

Dan Rather, I hope you kick Viacom’s puff-addled, celebrity-obsessed ass seven ways to Sunday in court. ++

Rather Report
Rachel Sklar, Huffington Post
September 20, 2007

Dan Rather was back on the CBS Evening News last night….for all of 20 seconds, which is still longer than he got on 60 Minutes in the last year of his contract. Zing! Watch the in-depth coverage here: [open link for video]

Twenty seconds, in and out, before moving on to a teaser about cute bears, complete with a bear-cam, for a segment lasting 2 minutes 50 seconds (see here - bears are moving to the suburbs!). On ABC, Charlie Gibson gave it 29 seconds at 19:57, moving briskly on to other topics. NBC, however, treated the story very differently, placing it second in the lineup (after tainted toys) and running it at 3:45 for a full 2 mins 12 seconds, running through the history of MemoGate and Rather’s ensuing sad tenure at CBS, plus the claims of the lawsuit (Rather as scapegoat, pacification of White House), but also devoting additional time to a mini-retrospective of Rather’s career. Brian Williams set it up as “A giant of the television industry is suing a giant of the television industry” and cited Rather’s more than four decades in broadcast journalism prior to the report from Ron Allen (with a special bonus cameo from Howard Kurtz). In a nice added touch, the report led with Rather’s famous (and famously self-important) sign-off: “And, to each of you: Courage.”

Interesting demarcation between the three broadcasts, likely fueled by Williams’ twin loves of history and really juicy, messy lawsuits. ++

Rather Charges That CBS Wanted to ‘Curry Favor’ With White House
Brian Stelter, NYT
September 19, 2007

The television industry will be poring over the $70 million lawsuit filed today by Dan Rather. Click here to view the suit (PDF). The 32-page filing lists 123 information items and seven causes of action and, in its conclusion, explicitly claims that CBS was motivated by political considerations:

Upon information and belief, the deceitful acts described in the foregoing paragraphs on the part of CBS and Mr. Moonves and Mr. Heyward, and promoted by Viacom and Mr. Redstone, were motivated by an intention to damage Mr. Rather, in order to curry favor with the Bush administration.

The chain of events that led to Mr. Rather’s termination and the damage to his reputation, the lies Mr. Moonves, Mr. Heyward and other executives told him in the aftermath of the Broadcast that led him to publicly and personally apologize, CBS’ biased investigation, and the lies he was told regarding his employment, were calculated by Mr. Moonves, Mr. Heyward and others at CBS, and promoted or directed by Mr. Redstone and Viacom to damage Mr. Rather’s career and reputation.

CBS had knowledge of the derogatory statements concerning Mr. Rather made by its employees, including those made by Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and others, and by permitting those statements to continue, significantly contributed to the barrage of bad press Mr. Rather faced following the Broadcast.

Rather’s lawsuit is the talk of the television news world today. Reuters is reporting that Rather “will donate much of the proceeds to the cause of promoting an independent press” if he wins the suit.

CBS issued a terse comment —”these complaints are old news and this lawsuit is without merit” and Viacom has no comment. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves