I like Dan Rather — he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, I like my reporting more confrontational, old style, but he might have rested on his long years of good solid reporting and not put his, as my son just mentioned, nuts on the line. To his credit, and perhaps due to his own peculiarities, he was never able to suck up the company line without looking a tad bewildered … the more spin and smoke came at him, the more difficulty he had making a confident, nail-it comment. If he was a little slow on the up-take on how much was being hidden behind the scenes, he was not unwilling to buck the status quo, as evidenced by his attempt at exposé on the Dubby’s AWOL status … which cost him. His last name is now a verb.
Pundits are taking Dan to task as old, tired, sad … it’s the sour grapes analysis. Others, like Greg Palast, below, are harsher, making him out a company dog, which I guess you could now say about any surviving newscaster in this nation. At least Dan came to the “outing” party … I count that in his favor, certainly more than the conservatives who are backing up, now, on their Decider, way too late to have been an influence on public opinion.
Dan got in the nations face with what he considered worthy news — I certainly considered it worthy; and then the dots disconnected and we had to focus on one limp bit of proof as opposed to the whole of the Dubbys drunken tale. If Dan’s report had not been questioned, of course, the Dub would have dismissed it as pre-Jesus hijinks … and the conservatives would have swallowed it whole anyway.
It’s a matter of character — Dan’s got some. And it would have been a good thing, before we let George take this nation on a drunken bender of and empire-building world war in the Middle East, to have known the details about that missing year of his … as reported below, his pissing on a car and screaming at police is a particularly dignified portrait of a potential commander and leader of the free world. Character. The missing link.
Here’s a collection from over the last weeks, most recent to least — good reads and corporate indictments.
Jude
Thank You Dan Rather
Leslie Griffith, HuffPo
October 4, 2007
Thank you Dan Rather. It’s balls to the wall time, and as a fellow Texan, you sure came through.
As an investigative journalist who worked as both a reporter and anchor for the San Francisco Bay Area’s highest rated newscast for 22 years, I can only say what happened to you nationally was also happening locally. You were told to conform to a Republican agenda or shut up. When you refused to march in step, you got Bush-whacked.
I read your brief and I know the drill. The erosion was slow and many of us barely noticed the small chiseling away of who and what we once were. Anchors and reporters depend on high ratings. If ratings fall in television, people get fired. In the months following 9/11, the President’s approval rating was 86 percent, and that’s when many in commercial journalism lost their way. To disagree or even ask a disagreeable question regarding the President and his decisions was interpreted as disloyal by many media corporations.
But now we have learned. Get the trashcan ready to catch the chips, because the chisel is swinging back the other way and we as journalists are about to regain our voices and America’s trust. Dan - the Man - as we call him in Texas is reminding the media conglomerates how it is supposed to work. News and those who report it are not supposed to be for sale. Dan remembers, and he’s about to explain it to us on a national scale, but first some explanations from my field of vision as to how we got here.
On January 2003, President Bush delivered his State of the Union address. Osama bin Laden turned into Saddam Hussein, and Afghanistan turned into Iraq. The press knew this was a bait and switch, but fearing reporters and anchors might appear unpatriotic, the corporate media made it clear that even if George W. Bush played twister in the nude while a few sheets to the wind instead of going to constitutional law classes at Yale, we were not allowed to talk about it.
Viacom and CBS, according to Dan, wanted to curry favor with the White House. There are very few media conglomerates that didn’t. Cox Broadcasting banned the Dixie Chicks from radio stations because their lead singer made a remark under her breath criticizing the president! Not wanting to appear unpatriotic, the town criers did not cry out. Many corporate media reporters became stenographers, not reporters on that State of the Union day. Those in television journalism, particularly those working for a Fox affiliate, were not allowed to ask questions that could be perceived as unpatriotic, and every question was seen as unpatriotic. Monarchs and dictators don’t allow questions. They also destroy those who speak ill of them. “Scooter - Valerie.” “Rove - Anyone.” Blackwater was running around in the name of the United States shooting first and asking questions later like third world rebels, and back at home, Fox became the fastest growing network with fearless leaders who believed in not only reporting the news but spinning it as well.
Just seven years ago, I looked up from my desk and saw my image on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour as our staff of independent journalists was described as the best local news in the country. But war broke out and the Internet took off and all over the country local news ratings dropped as viewers turned to the national networks for news from the war fronts. Contrary to all logical thinking, local reporters looked at their retirement plans and their kids in college and promptly puckered their lips on the behinds of corporate media and smooched. If my kids were still in college I would not have the courage to write this now. In response to fewer viewers, local television panicked into a downward spiral and many a trusting viewer decided to go elsewhere. Corporate media was demanding reporters adapt to the point of our own extinction.
Morphed into propaganda machines - cheerleaders with pompoms - it was heartbreaking to watch the demise and media corporations always bass-akwards responses. With two wars on two fronts they decided to go “Local.” Only local news. The war and the profound implications of it were relegated to 30 second stories buried deep into the newscast. (they don’t need to know about that.–but there’s a grass fire up the road!) If that’s not manipulation, I don’t know what is.
Here are some other sad results of this corporate bullying toward some of the best journalist in the country:
Anchors and reporters stopped asking why. The corporate media demanded nationalism without skepticism, believing ratings would fall further if reporters did their jobs.
Anchors and reporters starting taking their stories from satellite feeds coming directly to their desks and then standing in front of a chroma key delivering a story they did not collect and sometimes did not write. If viewers think every newscast looks the same that’s why. It is.
Anchors and reporters allowed chroma key pictures of conflict areas to appear behind them giving viewers the false impression they were on the scene of the conflict instead of demanding to be sent there. Some could not even point out on the map behind them where the conflict was.
Anchors and reporters allowed management to hire entertainment reporters and producers. It’s cheaper to entertain than to inform because an informed public makes wakes from slumber and makes noise.
Anchors and reporters began allowing precious hours meant for journalism to be filled with helicopter shots of the latest grassfire, traffic jam, or car chase, ala O.J.
Anchors and reporters allowed news directors and sales people to dictate their “look.” Good journalism does not have a “look.”
Anchors and reporters did not fight back when their investigative pieces were dropped. Managers feared losing advertising dollars and reporters acquiesced.
Anchors and reporters and producers agreed to story counts. Tell the story no matter how complicated in thirty seconds - throwing random and massive amounts of information at viewers without context.
Anchors and reporters started wearing American flags on their lapels. Some of whom never voted in any election.
Anchors and reporters began using genetically altered language: “War on Terrorism,” without explaining that many people in the world think Americans are the terrorists.
Anchors and reporters started referring to the United States government as “We.”
Anchors and reporters were handed press releases regarding corporate “mishaps” and began reading them verbatim. Like so: “Blank Oil Company had an explosion today; shelter in place, close the doors and windows, and don’t go outside. However, the ‘You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me Oil Company’ says everything is fine.”
Anchors and reporters agreed to report news that was already reported in newspapers and radio. Doing their own stories or advancing others creates controversy and potential lawsuits, betraying the sacred oath of corporate cronyism.
Anchors and reporters agreed to be physically altered in photographs, and airbrushed with make-up like playboy bunnies, as the media corporations ignored the news and invested in High Definition - hoping a grassfire on HD might look like news.
Anchors and reporters started advertising. “If you liked that story there will be more at six.” “If you want to get more information go to www. you’re_an_idiot.com. Makes you just want to scream: I’m here now; tell me now!
Anchors and reporters allowed producers to lead with Annie Nicole Smith instead of the “Scooter” Libby trial - making it clear that all sense of proportion and good judgment had been lost.
Corporations in this country are always a reflection of those in the White House. This White House is the Wild West, and corporations, even those who are charged with helping the public gain knowledge, are mining for gold. But today, when we had almost given up, Dan put his holster on.
Dan Rather Stands by His Story
His lawsuit will attempt to show that CBS tried to suppress the report on Bush’s National Guard Service and the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Dan Rather’s complaint against CBS and Viacom, its parent company, filed in New York state court on Sept. 19 and seeking $70 million in damages for his wrongful dismissal as “CBS Evening News” anchor, has aroused hoots of derision from a host of commentators. They’ve said that the former anchor is “sad,” “pathetic,” “a loser,” on an “ego” trip and engaged in a mad gesture “no sane person” would do, and that “no one in his right mind would keep insisting that those phony documents are real and that the Bush National Guard story is true.”
If the court accepts his suit, however, launching the adjudication of legal issues such as breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference with contract, it will set in motion an inexorable mechanism that will grind out answers to other questions as well. Then Rather’s suit will become an extraordinary commission of inquiry into a major news organization’s intimidation, complicity and corruption under the Bush administration. No congressional committee would be able to penetrate into the sanctum of any news organization to divulge its inner workings. But intent on vindicating his reputation, capable of financing an expensive legal challenge, and armed with the power of subpoena, Rather will charge his attorneys to interrogate news executives and perhaps administration officials under oath on a secret and sordid chapter of the Bush presidency.
In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather’s suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his “60 Minutes II” piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained — and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story.
Most cases of this sort are usually settled before discovery. But Rather has made plain that he is uninterested in a cash settlement. He has filed his suit precisely to be able to take depositions.
In his effort to demonstrate his mistreatment, Rather will detail how network executives curried favor with the administration, offering him up as a human sacrifice. The panel that CBS appointed and paid millions to in order to investigate Rather’s journalism will be exposed as a shoddy kangaroo court.
Rather’s complaint has already asserted a pattern of network submission to administration pressure, beginning with the Abu Ghraib story. In early 2004, Mary Mapes, a producer for “60 Minutes II” with more than two decades of experience, uncovered the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Her sources were sound and the evidence incontrovertible, but according to Rather’s complaint, “CBS management attempted to bury” the story. In a highly unusual move, then CBS News president Andrew Heyward and then senior vice president Betsy West personally intervened to demand editing changes and ever more “substantiation.”
Rather’s suit states that “for weeks, they refused to grant permission to air the story” and “continued to ‘raise the goalposts,’ insisting on additional substantiation.” Even after Mapes gained possession of some of the now-infamous photographs of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (a full set of which was later obtained and posted by Salon), the news executives suppressed the story, “in part,” according to Rather’s suit, “occasioned by acceding to pressures brought to bear by government officials.”
Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Rather at his home, sources close to the case told me, telling him that broadcasting the story would endanger “national security.” Myers explained to Rather that U.S. soldiers, just then poised for an assault on Fallujah, would be demoralized and suggested that Rather and CBS might threaten the outcome of the battle and the soldiers’ safety.
Only when Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter for the New Yorker, relying on different sources from Mapes’, unearthed the Abu Ghraib story and CBS executives learned that the magazine was about to scoop the network did they grudgingly permit it to be aired. “Even then,” Rather’s suit states, “CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be referenced on the CBS Evening News.” Feeling forced against their will to broadcast a story they knew was accurate, CBS’s executives did everything within their power to ensure the public would pay as little attention to it as possible by prohibiting any mention of it. CBS’s self-censorship set the stage for its reaction to the Bush National Guard story.
The widely accepted account that Mapes and Rather’s original piece on Bush and the Guard was unproved and discredited has been based on the notion that the documents revealed were false. But three years after the heated controversy exploded, these premises appear very uncertain in the cold light of day.
Upon graduation from Yale in 1968, George W. Bush was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard, known as the “Champagne Unit” for serving as a haven for the privileged sons of the Texas elite seeking to escape duty in Vietnam. Through carefully placed calls made by Bush family friends, Bush was edged ahead of a 500-man waiting list. Then, after failing to complete his required hours of flight, he requested transfer to a unit in Montgomery, Ala. But there is no proof that he ever performed any of his service there; he refused to take a physical and was grounded. Ordered to return to his Houston base, he simply disappeared. Yet he was honorably discharged in 1973, though there is no proof that he had fulfilled his obligation.
During the 2000 campaign, the Boston Globe reported a number of discrepancies in Bush’s National Guard record. However, the rest of the national press corps virtually ignored the Globe’s stories, instead preferring to swarm around fictions about Al Gore helpfully stoked by the Bush campaign. Bush refused to make public his military records, in contrast to his principal primary opponent, Sen. John McCain, who had released his. But the press collectively let the matter pass. Nonetheless, the gaps in Bush’s service as reported by the Globe had not been answered and hung in the air, if anyone cared to pursue them.
After breaking the Abu Ghraib story, Mapes, who lived in Texas and had reported on Bush when he was governor, began looking into the National Guard episode. By then, Sen. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War hero who was awarded the Silver and Bronze stars, had emerged as the Democratic candidate. The Bush operation arranged for funding a front group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to mount a smear campaign that Kerry had been dissembling all these years about his medals. Kerry’s campaign, like Gore’s, chose not to dignify obvious lies by responding, and the press lagged behind the story as it gained traction. Discrediting Kerry’s greatest biographical asset was calculated to compensate for Bush’s hidden liability. In February 2004, the Washington Post followed on the Boston Globe articles of 2000, and its reporters were unable to find anyone that could corroborate Bush’s claim that he had served at an Alabama air base in 1972. To an aggressive journalist like Mapes it seemed logical to examine Bush’s National Guard story, which remained a mystery.
The opaque story was partly illuminated by a piece in Salon, written by Mary Jacoby, on Sept. 2, 2004. Offering extensive documentation, including photographs and letters, Linda Allison, who had housed Bush during his missing year, explained that his drunken misbehavior was creating havoc for his father’s political aspirations and that the elder Bush asked his old friend Jimmy Allison, a political consultant from Midland, Texas, now living in Alabama, to handle the wastrel son. “The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy’s wing,” Linda Allison told Salon. During the time the younger Bush was under the watchful eye of the Allisons, he never went to a National Guard base or wore a uniform. “Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way,” said Allison. She did, however, remember him drinking, urinating on a car, screaming at police and trashing the apartment he had rented…
On Sept. 8, “60 Minutes II” broadcast its story. It featured former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, a Democrat, who disclosed that just before George W. Bush would be eligible for the draft, a mutual friend of then Rep. George H.W. Bush asked him to help procure the younger Bush a spot in the “Champagne Unit.” Barnes appeared on camera, saying: “It’s been a long time ago, but he said basically would I help young George Bush get in the Air National Guard. I was a young, ambitious politician doing what I thought was acceptable. It was important to make friends. And I recommended a lot of people for the National Guard during the Vietnam era — as speaker of the House and as lieutenant governor. I would describe it as preferential treatment.”
Then Rather, acting as correspondent, introduced new material drawn from the files of Col. Jerry Killian, Bush’s squadron commander: “‘60 Minutes’ has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian’s personal file. Among them, a never-before-seen memorandum from May 1972, where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about ‘how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.’ Lt. Bush tells his commander ‘he is working on a campaign in Alabama … and may not have time to take his physical.’ Killian adds that he thinks Lt. Bush has gone over his head, and is ‘talking to someone upstairs.’”
Another Killian memo contained the coup de grâce: “I ordered that 1st Lt. Bush be suspended not just for failing to take a physical … but for failing to perform to U.S. Air Force/Texas Air National Guard standards. The officer [then Lt. Bush] has made no attempt to meet his training certification or flight physical.”
Within minutes of the conclusion of the broadcast, conservative bloggers launched a counterattack. The chief of these critics was a Republican Party activist in Georgia. Almost certainly, these bloggers, who had been part of meetings or conference calls organized by Karl Rove’s political operation, coordinated their actions with Rove’s office.
Questioned for the “60 Minutes” story, White House communications director Dan Bartlett had not denied the story but simply characterized it as “dirty.” The right-wing bloggers raised questions about the authenticity of the Killian documents, arguing that typewriters of the time lacked the specific superscript in the documents, that the proportional spacing was wrong and the font anachronistic, and that therefore they were likely fabricated on a computer. Various handwriting and typewriter experts weighed in, some challenging the documents’ authenticity. The press almost uniformly took the absence of a universal opinion of experts as proof of the documents’ falsity. Because they could not be proved with complete certainty to be authentic, they must be counterfeit.
While the battle over the authenticity experts and assorted inconclusive sources continued, CBS interviewed Marian Carr Knox, who had been Col. Killian’s assistant when the memos were allegedly produced. She didn’t recall typing them and didn’t believe Killian had written them (though various handwriting experts had verified his signature), but she also asserted, “The information in here is correct.”
Under fire, CBS executives reeled backward. On Sept. 20, Heyward issued an apology: “Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.” And Rather chimed in: “If I knew then what I know now — I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.” With these self-abasing mea culpas (Rather claims in his complaint that his statement was “coerced”), the veracity of the story about Bush’s past seemed to be settled in his favor. But the underlying facts of the story were not discredited; nor was the authenticity of the documents resolved.
The day after these apologies CBS announced the creation of a review panel to determine “what errors occurred.” Two Bush family loyalists, Richard Thornburgh, former attorney general in the elder Bush’s administration, and Louis Boccardi, former executive editor and CEO of the Associated Press, were chosen to head the internal investigation. Thornburgh had been the subject of critical Rather reports, while Boccardi felt close and indebted to the elder Bush for being helpful as vice president in gaining the release of AP reporter Terry Anderson, held hostage for six years in Lebanon. Lawyers in Thornburgh’s firm with no background in journalism and media performed the real work of the panel and wrote its final report.
As the panel called witnesses, Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (CBS’s owner), declared his interest in the 2004 election. “I look at the election from what’s good for Viacom. I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom,” he said. In fact, Viacom had a number of crucial issues before the Federal Communications Commission, including loosening media ownership rules. “I don’t want to denigrate Kerry,” said Redstone, “but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people … But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.”
Rather believed that the panel would conduct a fair-minded inquiry. But he learned that neither he nor Mapes would be allowed to cross-examine witnesses. They heard from some researchers on the “60 Minutes II” staff that before they had been questioned, a CBS executive had told them that they should feel free to pin all blame on Rather and Mapes. CBS had told Rather to cease investigating the story and had even hired a private investigator of its own, Erik Rigler. Rather and Mapes discovered that Rigler’s investigation had uncovered corroboration for their story. Rather’s complaint states that “after following all the leads given to him by Ms. Mapes, he [Rigler] was of the opinion that the Killian Documents were most likely authentic, and that the underlying story was certainly accurate.” But rather than probing Rigler on his findings, the panel, to the extent its lawyers questioned him in a single telephone call, “appeared more interested whether Mr. Rigler had uncovered derogatory information concerning Mr. Rather or Ms. Mapes, as to which he had no information,” according to the Rather complaint. Rigler’s report was suppressed, never presented to the panel, and remains suppressed by CBS. Nor did the panel fully question James Pierce, the handwriting expert consulted by “60 Minutes” who insisted that the signature on the documents was surely Killian’s.
When Mapes appeared before the panel, she was harshly questioned at length about her use of the word “horseshit.” On the issue of the special privileges granted to those sons of wealth in the “Champagne Unit,” Thornburgh asked her, “Mary, don’t you think it’s possible that all these fine young men got in on their own merits?”
When it came to the merits of the facts the panel elided them. It never addressed the facts at all. Instead it criticized the “60 Minutes” team for failing to “obtain clear authentication” of the Killian documents, among other “errors,” though it admitted it could not prove one way or another whether they were inauthentic. Mapes and three other producers were dismissed. “60 Minutes II” was abolished. And on the day after Bush’s reelection, Rather was unceremoniously fired. His contract had called for him to continue as anchor for an additional year and then to serve as a correspondent for “60 Minutes” and “60 Minutes II,” but that promise was not honored. CBS believed that by severing its link with Rather it could put the whole incident behind it and begin a new happy relationship with the ascendant Republicans.
An article by James Goodale, former vice chairman and general counsel of the New York Times, in the New York Review of Books on April 7, 2005, and his subsequent exchange with Thornburgh and Boccardi, went little noticed. Goodale found the panel’s report filled with flaws, lacking a factual basis, revealing an absence of due diligence and due process, and substituting empty legal concepts and language for any understanding of the actual gritty practice of journalism. Goodale determined that the “underlying facts of Rather’s ‘60 Minutes’ report are substantially true.” He observed, “Since the broadcast, no one has come forward to say the program was untruthful.”
Goodale’s summation rejected the report and left its credibility in tatters: “The rest of the report, which is directed to the newsgathering process of CBS, is flawed. The panel was unable to decide whether the documents were authentic or not. It didn’t hire its own experts. It didn’t interview the principal expert for CBS. It all but ignored an important argument for authenticating the documents — ‘meshing.’ It did not allow cross-examination. It introduced a standard for document authentication very difficult for news organizations to meet — ‘chain of custody’ — and, lastly, it characterized parts of the broadcast as false, misleading, or both, in a way that is close to nonsensical. One is tempted to say that the report has as many flaws as the flaws it believes it has found in Dan Rather’s CBS broadcast.”
But Goodale’s magisterial and experienced voice seemed to be a faint cry in the wilderness. Who, after all, cared anymore?
In November 2005, Mapes published a memoir, “Truth and Duty,” containing her memo to Thornburgh and Boccardi that they had failed to include in the appendix of the panel’s report, although they reproduced many other memos and documents. Mapes’ argument was that the Killian documents “meshed” with the facts in precise and nuanced ways. “The Killian memos, when married to the official documents, fit like a glove,” she wrote. “There is not a date, or a name, or an action out of place. Nor does the content of the Killian memos differ in any way from the information that has come out after our story … In order to conclude that the documents are forged or utterly unreliable, two questions must be answered: 1) how could anyone have forged such pristinely accurate information; and 2) why would anyone have taken such great pains to forge the truth?” But Mapes’ book, like Goodale’s article, was all but ignored.
Rather has always been an uncomfortable figure, sometimes abrasive, sometimes strangely inappropriate or baffling, given to rustic rhetoric at odd moments, and sometimes and suddenly lapsing into teary sentimentality or bursts of patriotic doggerel. Since his confrontations as the correspondent covering the Nixon White House, conservatives have targeted him as a symbol of the despised “liberal media.” However idiosyncratic, Rather stood for the remnants of CBS’s tradition of speaking truth to power, as Edward R. Murrow did finally about Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Walter Cronkite did finally about the Vietnam War and Watergate. The corporate unease with Murrow’s outspokenness, leading to the cancellation of his weekly program, “See It Now” (depicted in the recent film “Good Night, and Good Luck”), was little different from the unease with Rather a half-century later. At last, the corporation’s necessity for demonizing Rather coincided with the long-standing conservative demonizing.
When CBS replaced the edgy Rather with the sugary Katie Couric as anchor of the “Evening News,” it imagined it had solved its problem, its “errors.” The news would get softer, the Republicans in control of the White House and Congress would be nicer, Viacom would grab more media, and ratings would climb. Thus, dismissing Rather would yield untold dividends. Unfortunately for CBS’s visionaries, none of that has worked out as planned. Couric simply lacks basic journalistic instincts and skills, and the “CBS Evening News” is at rock bottom in ratings and sinking farther.
Rather could have simply allowed the statute of limitations to run out, lived off his millions, and faded away. But the incident ate at him. On one level, the Bush National Guard story is about Bush and the National Guard. On another, of course, it is about Rather’s reputation. But on yet another it is about CBS’s overwhelming desire to please the Bush White House and censor itself. The White House campaign against Rather has been so successful that many in the national press corps behave as though in mouthing its talking points they are demonstrating their own independent thought.
On Sept. 20, the day after he filed his suit, Rather said, “The story was true.” Rather’s suit may turn into one of the most sustained and informative acts of investigative journalism in his long career. He is not going gentle into that good night.
Dan Rather’s Magnum Opus
William Rivers Pitt. t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Wednesday 26 September 2007
Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
~ Graham Greene
His face was once a totem, a comforting TV-screen touchstone. His voice and inflection lent suppertime credence to the myth of American permanence, safety and dependability, night after night, for a quarter of a century. It is surpassingly strange, therefore, to encompass Dan Rather’s recent and abrupt metamorphosis. The former “CBS Nightly News” anchor, previously a study in constancy and predictability, has suddenly become a genuine threat to the entire mainstream news industry.
Last week, Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit (PDF link, Adobe Acrobat required) against CBS, its chief executive Leslie Moonves, former network president Andrew Heyward, CBS’s parent company Viacom and Viacom’s Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone.
The suit stems from a sensational September 2004 CBS report detailing documentary evidence of George W. Bush’s poor performance during and constant absence from service in the Texas Air National Guard during the early 1970s. The report was met with an immediate chorus of scornful dismissals from Bush administration officials, Bush campaign spokespeople and right-wing bloggers that eventually cast doubt upon the authenticity of the documents. Within two weeks, CBS retreated in humiliation from the story. Rather staggered on as the “CBS Nightly News” anchor for a few more excruciating months, but finally departed on March 9, 2005.
Among the assertions in his suit, Rather claims CBS failed to provide him sufficient time and support to defend the veracity of his report, that the network essentially folded like sodden newsprint under pressure from right-wing advocates of the Bush administration, and that the entire matter permanently ravaged his professional reputation. Presumably, CBS finds Rather’s public allegations disconcerting to at least some degree; their news section is already burdened by cratering viewership resulting from the Katie Couric fiasco, so the additional burden of this suit can only be another unwelcome complication in an already messy state of affairs.
The danger to the mainstream news industry in general, however, is not in the allegations themselves, but in the context surrounding them provided by a long-time insider who knows where all the bodies are buried.
Consider the first paragraph on the fourth page of the complaint. According to Rather, CBS chose to jettison both himself and the Texas Air National Guard story because, “CBS’s parent company, Viacom, and it Chief Executive Officer, Sumner Redstone, considered it to be in its corporate interest to curry favor with the Bush administration.”
Consider CBS’s handling of a far more serious Bush administration scandal, the torture of Iraqis by American forces at Abu Ghraib prison, as described on pages 11 and 12 of the complaint. According to Rather, “Despite the story’s importance, and because of the negative impact the story would have on the Bush administration, with which Viacom and CBS wished to curry favor, CBS management attempted to bury it.”
“Even after obtaining nearly a dozen now notorious photographs,” continues the complaint, “which made it impossible to deny the accuracy of the story, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to delay the story for an additional three weeks… CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be referenced on the CBS Evening News.”
“What emerges here,” writer Greg Sargent concludes on the Talking Points Memo blog, “is a striking portrait of a big news org that, fearful of pressure from conservative critics and eager to curry favor with the Bush administration, allegedly dragged its feet to an extraordinary degree in order to avoid revealing the truths it knew about a horrifying scandal of international dimensions. Sobering stuff.”
Sobering indeed, and therein lies the threat. The willful collusion between CBS management and the Bush administration, offered by Rather to frame his accusations, illuminate an insidious, grotesque, and altogether deadly alignment of circumstances hiding in plain sight before the entire American populace. An explanation for why the legitimate fears and anxious uncertainties of the people are never soothed or clarified by mainstream news outlets like CBS, but are instead methodically aggravated and intentionally amplified by those outlets, begins to take shape in light of Rather’s inside-view revelations.
Underscored here, in no uncertain terms, are the grim realities of modern American journalism, realities that have little to do with the original conception of the institution. While a number of the Founders were not especially enamored with the printed slings and arrows of the journalists of their day, they were united in the belief that a free and honest press was absolutely necessary to the safety and liberty of the country. “The only security of all,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1823, “is in a free press.”
American democracy ceases to function when people blither their votes into ballot boxes on the basis of opinions and ideologies that are swaddled in the beggar-rags of ubiquitous disinformation and bewilderingly muddled cant, but such is now and has long been this nation’s common plight. Today’s “free press,” however, bears little resemblance to the conceived constitutional bulwark cherished by the Founders.
In its place, we now have a tightly-woven confederation of profit-seeking businesses that own virtually every print and broadcast news outlet of significance in the country. There is but scant allegiance to the truth found within these outlets, because their foremost priority when reporting on most issues of national consequence is to protect the interests of those parent companies and their advertisers.
If a parent company is heavily involved in the manufacture and sale of weaponry to the Pentagon, for example, that company’s pet news outlet will skew its coverage to cast the most favorable light on a war - and on the politicians and political parties who support it - because that is money in the bank for that parent. There is nothing theoretical in this; NBC, MSNBC and CNBC all championed both the Iraq war and its architects, because they are owned by huge defense contractor General Electric, which has profited enormously from the war.
Media conglomerates like Time-Warner - whose massive holdings include CNN, HBO, Warner Bros., AOL, Time magazine, People magazine, dozens of other periodicals, film production companies, book publishers and television networks - are utterly incapable of providing objective reports to the American people regarding a broad constellation of significant and pressing issues. CNN is inescapably connected to all of Time-Warner’s myriad subsidiaries and affiliates, and to the political affiliations, which guarantee the biggest profits for these entities.
Thus, many stories on a variety of serious matters (the crippling side-effects of well-hyped but poorly-tested pills, for example, or the abuse of workers in third-world technological sweatshops, or thousands of dead fish rotting downstream from a coal plant, or the deceptions that led to a failed war and thousands of dead American soldiers) almost never tend to see the light of mainstream-newsroom day. This is not called censorship or suppression or collusion or treason in the offices where such decisions are made. This is called sound business practice.
In their desire to curry favor with the Bush administration, the mainstream news media became willing accomplices to one of the most unspeakable crimes ever committed against the American people: the deliberate and strategic use and manipulation of fear by the Bush administration to increase their own power and influence.
The ordinary common sense and sound judgment of the American people was systematically attacked and debased, the psyche of the entire population was ceaselessly pummeled by a paranoid muddle of murky suspicions and nebulous fears, in order to create a population of permanently frightened and thus easily led dupes. The grisly reports of inhuman acts of torture by Americans, the undermining of the Constitution and our rights, the program of domestic surveillance, all this and so much besides, fell by the wayside because Americans became programmed by the news media to accept the unacceptable, lest they be branded as traitors or killed outright by swarming hordes of al-Qaeda/insurgent/shoe-bombers.
It will be many years before the nation recovers from this despicable onslaught, if indeed it ever does, and the mainstream news industry is exactly as guilty as the Bush administration for perpetrating this unspeakable, harmful offense. Even amid the demonstrably ruinous consequences of their behavior, the prime players of the mainstream news industry still languish like cream-glutted cats before the furnace of history, and still seek to curry favor from the Bush administration.
Nothing could be more dangerous to their conniving complacency than the exposure of their voluntary collusion in the promulgation of mortal lies and lethal hyperbole. Conversely, nothing could be more beneficial to the health and security of America and its citizens than exposing the sham passing itself off as “journalism,” exposing what was so deliberately done to them, and exposing the grim truth that almost everything they’ve heard from their government and their news media has been a rank, rancid, self-serving pile of lies designed to imprison their minds and control their behavior.
Because he willingly participated in this for many years, Dan Rather cannot be considered some sort of saint or martyr. But it was that very participation which informs his lawsuit, and because he is now divulging what he came to know through his complicity, Rather is a true menace as far as the mainstream news industry is concerned. This is his final broadcast of sorts, his magnum opus in 32 pages, a parting jolt of desperately needed journalism, one last story filed to report the truth about what journalism has become.
Koppel on Rather Suit: Squeezing Out of Newsman was a ‘Travesty’
Chuck Ross, TVWeek
Calling the ouster of Dan Rather from CBS News in 2006 a “travesty,” newsman Ted Koppel said today that he hopes the $70 million suit filed by Mr. Rather against CBS and Viacom will bring Mr. Rather “relief from his [emotional] pain.”
Mr. Koppel said he “hurt” for Mr. Rather, whom he characterized as a friend. Addressing the “60 Minutes” report about President George Bush’s National Guard service that preceded Mr. Rather’s departure from CBS, Mr. Koppel said the story was “much more correct than incorrect.” Mr. Koppel said that those responsible for the incorrect parts of the report deserved to be chastised and punished.
It is a “travesty” that “Dan Rather was squeezed out” with such little class from CBS News, Mr. Koppel said today at a forum at Fordham University in New York City that was put on by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
The academy tonight presents its annual News and Documentary Emmys. During this evening’s ceremony, Mr. Koppel, the former ABC “Nightline” newscaster who now works for Discovery Communications, is scheduled to be honored with a Lifetime Achievement award from NATAS.
Mr. Koppel also spoke about the difficulties that network news departments face as parts of media conglomerates. Speaking of his former employer, he said, “ABC News is a pimple on the elephant’s behind”—the elephant being ABC parent Walt Disney Co.
Explaining the remark later to TelevisionWeek, Mr. Koppel said he first realized how small ABC News was in relation to Disney as a whole some years ago when he was flipping through the annual report and saw that he was many, many pages into it before ABC News received a mention.
The dilemma stems from the fact that the media giants are primarily entertainment companies and thus have to make money, Mr. Koppel said. He cited the birth of “60 Minutes” on CBS in 1968 as a watershed moment that became a double-edged sword: It was a serious news product that was embraced by viewers, which was good. Unfortunately, it also made a lot of money and proved to the owners of the broadcast networks that a news division could be—and in their view should be—profitable.
Mr. Koppel also explained why the White House has not let him have a one-on-one interview with Mr. Bush at any time since Mr. Bush has been president.
When Mr. Bush was running for president, Mr. Koppel asked then Governor Bush what qualified him to be president. Mr. Bush cited his experience as governor of Texas, his experience running the Texas Rangers baseball team, as well as the fact that he was a loving husband and father.
Mr. Koppel replied that those qualifications would seem to be good qualifications if one were running for president of the Kiwanis Club, but not for president of the United States.
Ever since then it’s been the big freeze for Mr. Koppel from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Dan Rather, Tased and Confused: The Still-Unreported Story of “Top Gun” George Bush
Greg Palast, Smirking Chimp
Sep 25 2007
Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.
Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.
In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush’s approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.
It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.
The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.
But CBS caved. So did Dan.
That’s according to Rather’s written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was “enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration.” Viacom then set out to, “divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush’s service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House….”
Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord’s voice, admits he then “refrained from defending” the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that “his contract would be extended.”
Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.
Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn’t live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that’s what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed.
The Story Still Not Reported
By contrast, BBC never backed down from the story of the fix that got Little George out of ‘Nam. We had a smoking hot document [view it here] and an interview with the crucial source: the man who confessed to making the call for Bush to the head of the Air Guard.
No, I won’t give you his name. I don’t expose sources - unlike Dan and CBS. That’s another thing that makes me just FURIOUS. Rather revealed, then blamed, a source, retired Air Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. Burkett, an Abilene rancher, is a courageous, stand-up guy. [See The Real Lt. Col. Burkett]. But after standing up with Dan, he was ruined, ostracized from the cattle business. No one would sell him feed. Dan got a multi-million dollar kiss-off from Viacom. Burkett got dead cows and bankruptcy.
And there’s more. More that Dan didn’t report. As I said, Dan picked up an old story, one that I reported, as did others, in 1999. But we added our discovery of a confidential document which had walked its way out of the files of the US Department of Justice. It was a whistleblower statement that explained why the Lt. Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, who arranged for George W. to get into the Air Guard, kept silent about it for 35 years. It states that, in 1997, Governor George W. Bush overruled his state’s Lottery director and gave a billion-dollar contract to a company tied to Barnes. Barnes received a cool fee of $23 million from the contractor.
This is a devastating accusation. And one that’s more serious than the scandal of a draft-dodging rich kid’s vile use of daddy’s connections three decades ago. Here was evidence of gross abuse of public office by Governor Bush to pay off a crony who kept silent while Bush ran for the presidency.
US Reporting: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
But how could I expect Rather to take on the tough story when he wouldn’t stand by the easy one? In June 2002, two years before his media lynching, Rather explained his Fear of Reporting in an interview on BBC Television (cautiously, to a European audience only):
“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”
This is what’s so frustrating about Dan Rather. He’s two people: a real journalist locked inside a television news-actor begging for air-time. Indeed, disgustingly, in his law suit, he conceals his inner reporter by claiming he only “narrated” the draft dodge story. For shame.
But what about all those other preening birds on the chicken ranch known as US television news? Rather tells us he wasn’t alone in failing to ask tough questions. Not one damn US reporter asked Bush at a press conference, “Yes or no, Mr. President: Did your daddy call Ben Barnes to get you out of the war in Vietnam?”
[For the record, BBC did ask for the President’s denial or admission. We got none. And when Dan’s CBS boss, Leslie Moonves, said Dan’s story, “ignored information that cast doubt” on the revelation that Bush Sr. put in the fix to get his son into the Air Guard, I asked Moonves to provide that information. In fact, I offered him $100,000 for his info which would have shown Dan’s story false. He never produced it.]
The same week Dan confessed that he agreed to shut up, a journalism student, Andrew Meyer of Florida, insisted on asking tough questions of the man Bush defeated, John Kerry. For Andrew’s impertinence, he was hit with 50,000 volts from a taser.
Andrew is just a student and still needs a couple of lessons in posing questions properly. (Lesson One: “Wear a grounding wire.”) But Andrew has the next lesson down pat: ask the question they don’t want to hear when they don’t want to hear it. Rather could use a few lessons in journalism himself - from Andrew - about taking the heat for the story.
Seeing Andrew’s arrest and Dan’s complaint, I was thinking that perhaps, instead of tase-ing those reporters who ask questions, we might tase those who don’t.
60 Minutes: Shelving a Story to Boost Bush?
CBS puts Niger expose on hold as boss endorses Republicans
9/28/04
In an outrageous politicization of journalism, CBS announced it would not air a report on forged documents that the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war until after the November 2 election (New York Times , 9/25/04). A network spokesperson issued a statement declaring, “We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election.”
The 60 Minutes segment was ready to air on September 8, but was bumped in favor of the now infamous report that relied on supposed National Guard memos whose authenticity CBS now says it cannot confirm. The furor over the Guard memos has created a situation where CBS executives say “the network can now not credibly air a report questioning how the Bush administration could have gotten taken in by phony documents” (Newsweek online, 9/22/04).
Of course, what’s really inappropriate here is CBS allowing its PR problems to suppress a news report on an important issue until after it no longer matters. The shelved 60 Minutes story deals with the origins of documents purportedly showing that Iraq under Saddam Hussein tried to obtain uranium from Niger–documents that turned out to be forgeries. The story, according to the Newsweek online report, asks tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech.
Though such questions are clearly relevant to a presidential campaign that largely revolves around Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, CBS intends to keep the answers to itself until the election has passed. Could there be more than the embarrassment over the Guard story behind this decision?
Sumner Redstone, CEO of CBS ’s parent company Viacom, made an unusual political statement at a gathering of corporate leaders in Hong Kong (Asian Wall Street Journal, 9/24/04):
I don’t want to denigrate Kerry… but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people…. But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.
Redstone repeated these sentiments in an interview with Time (10/4/04):
There has been comment upon my contribution to Democrats like Senator Kerry. Senator Kerry is a good man. I’ve known him for many years. But it happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.
According to a write-up by Forbes (9/23/04)–the sponsor of the conference where Redstone issued his endorsement of Bush–the CEO asserted that “he never gets involved in any aspects of the network’s news coverage.” But that claim, hard to believe when made by any media industry chief executive, seems particularly dubious given Forbes’ report that “Redstone said he has been talking daily to top CBS officials and to Viacom board members about the controversy” over the Guard memos.
It is journalistically indefensible for CBS to withhold a story due to embarrassment incurred by another, unrelated piece. It is particularly unacceptable when the shelving of a story benefits a candidate that CBS’s boss has just publicly endorsed. If CBS wants to restore trust in its news judgment, it can begin by applying journalistic standards, not political calculations, to the decision on when to air its report on the origin of the forged Niger documents.
The Scoop on CBS: Why Redstone Sold Dan Rather for 20 Pieces of Silver
As everyone knows by now, Dan Rather, who has the highest recognizability and highest favorability rating of any anchor in the US and who was dropped like a hot potato by CBS after the authenticity of a single document in a single program was called into question, has filed a $70million law suit against his former employer
McCamy Taylor, SFGate
Fri Sep-21-07
In the suit, filed a day earlier in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, Rather claimed CBS and Viacom Inc. used him as a “scapegoat” and intentionally botched the aftermath of a discredited story about President Bush’s military service to curry favor with the White House. He was removed from his “CBS Evening News” post in March 2005.
As another DU member has posted, Viacom’s chief, Sumner Redstone made no bones about which presidential candidate he favored in the 2004 election:
The chairman of the entertainment giant Viacom said the reason was simple: Republican values are what U.S. companies need. Speaking to some of America’s and Asia’s top executives gathered for Forbes magazine’s annual Global CEO Conference, Mr. Redstone declared: “I look at the election from what’s good for Viacom. I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom.
“I don’t want to denigrate Kerry,” he went on, “but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people. . . . But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.”
What an understatement. The truth was, Viacom/CBS desperately needed a second Bush term if it was to hold together its media empire and watch it grow, and it feared a John Kerry presidency. Here’s a summary of what was going on behind the scenes at CBS from CommonDreams.org:
In the spring of 2003, Michael Powell tried to hand over the airwaves and newspapers to fewer and fewer tycoons by further loosening restrictions on how many media outlets a single company could own. Powell tried to scrap 30-year-old rules that limited the reach of any television network to no more than 35 percent of the national population, and limits on cross-ownership that, for example, prevented newspapers from buying television or radio stations in the same city. The new rules would have allowed a broadcast network to buy up stations that together reached 45 percent of the national population.
The attack on the existing media-ownership rules came from predictable corners: Both Viacom, which owns CBS, and Rupert Murdoch’s conservative FOX News Channel were already in violation, and would be forced to sell off stations to come into compliance with the 35-percent limit. The rule change would enable Murdoch to control the airwaves of entire cities. That would be fine with Bush and the Powells, since Murdoch is one of their biggest boosters.
It looked like Powell, backed by the Bush White House and with Republican control of Congress, would have no trouble ramming through these historic rule changes. The broadcast industry left nothing to chance: Between 1998 and 2004, broadcasters spent a boggling $249 million lobbying the federal government, including spending $27 million on federal candidates and lawmakers.
This would normally be called bribery. At the FCC, it’s just business as usual.
You would think that FCC deregulation, affecting millions of Americans, would get major play in the media. But the national networks knew that if people found out about how one media mogul could own nearly everything you watch, hear and read in a city, there would be revolt. The solution for them was simple: They just didn’t cover the issue for a year. The only thing the networks did was to join together — and you thought they were competitors? — in a brief filed with the FCC to call for media deregulation.
And then, something remarkable happened: Media activists — an unlikely coalition of liberals and conservatives — mounted a national campaign to defeat Powell and stop the corporate sell-off. The FCC received 2 million letters and e-mails, most of them opposing the sell-off. The Prometheus Radio Project, a grass-roots media activism group, sued to stop the sale of our airwaves, and won in federal court last June. These are hopeful signals that the days of backroom deals by media titans are numbered
Now, that federal court ruling was a big problem for media giants like Viacom/CBS. After all its hard work and all its money (which had been essentially flushed down the toilet) it was back where it started in 2000—out of compliance with federal media ownership rules with no room to grow. (For those who like legal documents, here is one with lots of facts Unless the case was overturned by the Supreme Court, it was stuck.
And Viacom/CBS had another problem. W. was not doing as well as it had hoped, and John Kerry was not the friend of media giants that George W. Bush had been.
Media consolidation, an issue that galvanized millions of Americans in 2003 is nowhere to be found on the election map of 2004. That was until Sunday, when Senator John Kerry ventured forth on CSPAN to confirm that, had he been around to vote on last year’s proposal to loosen rules against media ownership, he would have voted against it.
“I wasn’t there for the vote, but I was 100 percent in favor of overturning his rule,” Kerry told CSPAN executive vice president Susan Swain during an interview taped earlier in the week. The “his” Kerry was referring to is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell. And the “rule” in question was the FCC’s ill-fated effort to allow media companies to buy up more local media outlets by raising an ownership cap from a 35 to a 45 percent reach of the national audience.
This timeline from Bill Moyers shows what was happening in 2003 and early 2004 about the media merger issue:
The Republican Congress was persuaded to raise the media ownership cap just enough to put NewsCorp and Viacom in compliance with the law, but they had no room to grow. (And since Viacom had been described as owning 41% of the nation’s television channels in the court documents from 2001, I wonder if some one was fudging the math.) No problem, said the Bush administration. Just as soon as we win this re-election campaign, we are taking the appeal to the Supreme Court, which will raise the federal media ownership cap back up, so you guys in the entertainment business can start expanding again.
So, if you were Sumner Redstone and it was 2004 and you were faced with a choice of George W. Bush who was promising to write you a blank check for unlimited media acquisitions and mergers or John Kerry, who was really uncomfortable with the whole idea of too much media power concentrated into one set of hands, which candidate would you prefer? And if, as I suspect, you were actually out of compliance with the law (television holdings don’t just shrink from greater than 41% down to 39% overnight), you might be a little nervous, too, that the current administration might decide to start enforcing the law.
The irony of it all is that the Bush administration never intended to keep its promise to launch a court appeal of the lower court ruling that threw out the FCC federal media owership rule changes. It was Michael Powell, who had done the administration’s dirty work for years, who suddenly had a fit a conscience—or maybe he got pissed off at how they treated his dad, and he decided to get even in the best way he knew how, by turning the mainstream media against the Bush administration, by revealing them to be liars and cheats.
The Bush administration yesterday abandoned plans to ask the Supreme Court to allow a set of controversial rules to take effect that would have loosened restrictions on how large media conglomerates could grow.
The decision disappointed big media companies that had lobbied heavily in support of the rules and thrilled those who had fought to keep tighter rein on how much control one company should have over television, newspapers and radio stations in individual markets.
The rules would have allowed television networks such as CBS and Fox to buy a few more television stations nationally and let one company own the biggest newspaper and highest-rated television station in most cities.
Note the date on the Washington Post article. Jan. 28, 2005. When I read that, the curious behavior of the news networks over the exit polls made sense. I also knew that the Bush administration was in for a bumpy second term with the news media, because hell hath no fury…. The administration had waited until after W. was safely sworn in for his second term to admit to their flunkies in the corporate media that they had no intention of keeping their promises, probably because they knew that they would fail. When several of the networks got together to launch their own appeal, they failed. The result was coverage of DSMs, Cindy Sheehan and Katrina.
However, this revelation came too late for Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes, who had already been sold for 20 pieces of silver by their boss, Sumner Redstone, who preferred to dismantle the jewel in CBS’s crown, 60 Minutes in order to curry favor with the White House in order to make money through mergers, rather than do it the old fashioned way, by producing quality programming.
Dan Rather : ‘Somebody’s got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive… with government interference in news’
Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane, Raw Story
Friday September 21, 2007
Former CBS anchor Dan Rather recently filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS, saying they made him a “scapegoat” when he was fired for a September 2004 story on 60 Minutes about President Bush’s unsatisfactory service in the Texas Air National Guard.
When Rather appeared on Larry King’s program Thursday, King began by showing him a 2005 clip of himself saying, “I’m not a victim of anything except my own shortcomings.”
But he added, “Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news.”
“I’ve learned a good deal since that time,” said Rather. “It’s reported that Sumner Redstone [president of Viacom] … was described as being enraged that the news division, this story, had cost Viacom and CBS in Washington, and he wanted Dan Rather and everybody connected with it out.”
“They sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain, and in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News,” he said.
Rather said he still believes the 60 Minutes report was correct. “[CBS] sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain,” he stated, “and in so doing I think they undermined a lot at CBS News.”
“Nobody to this day has shown that these documents were fraudulent,” continued Rather, referring to the disputed memos featured in the 60 Minutes story. “Nobody has proved that they were fraudulent, much less a forgery. … The truth of this story stands up to this day.” Rather added that he believed somebody with subpoena power could get to the bottom of the matter pretty quickly.
The following video is from CNN’s Larry King Live, broadcast on September 20, 2007. [Open link]
Courage for Dan Rather
Mary Mapes, HuffPo
September 20, 2007
Gee, just when I was all excited about Wednesday’s big premiere of the new CBS cultural triumph Kid Nation, my old friend Dan Rather went and blew my whole evening out of the water by filing a massive lawsuit against the company.
Here we go again.
It has been three years since we aired our much-maligned story on President Bush’s National Guard service and reaped a whirlwind of right-wing outrage and talk radio retaliation. That part of the assault on our story was not unexpected. In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.
What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.
To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War — and then covered it up — was no big deal. Our having the temerity to say it on national TV was unforgivable and we had to be destroyed. They organized, with the help of longtime well-connected Republican activists, and began their assault.
Actually, we had done a straightforward, well-substantiated story. We presented former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes in his first ever interview saying that he had pulled strings to get the future president into the National Guard after a Bush family friend requested help in keeping the kid out of Vietnam.
And we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush’s former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president’s official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks.
We reported that since these documents were copies, not originals, they could not be fully authenticated, at least not in the legal sense. They could not be subjected to tests to determine the age of the paper or the ink. We did get corroboration on the content and support from a couple of longtime document analysts saying they saw nothing indicating that the memos were not real.
Instantly, the far right blogosphere bully boys pronounced themselves experts on document analysis, and began attacking the form and font in the memos. They screamed objections that ultimately proved to have no basis in fact. But they captured the argument. They dominated the discussion by churning out gigabytes of mind-numbing internet dissertations about the typeface in the memos, focusing on the curl at the end of the “a,” the dip on the top of the “t,” the spacing, the superscript, which typewriters were used in the military in 1972.
It was a deceptive approach, and it worked.
These critics blathered on about everything but the content. They knew they would lose that argument, so they didn’t raise it. They focused on the most obscure, most difficult to decipher element of the story and dove in, attacking CBS, Dan Rather, me, the story and the horse we rode in on — without respite, relentlessly, for days.
Soon, traditional media began repeating some of the claims and joining in the attack on the story. They didn’t do any real work on the substance of the story; they just wanted to talk about typeface. And that was an empty, unsolvable argument that did nothing but serve the purposes of the Bush administration, which had been fanning the flames of the controversy and hoping to avoid any hard questions.
The fracas scared the bejeezus out of the CBS corporate types who were completely unaccustomed to the rough and tumble interaction of the blog world. Frankly, the foaming-at-the-mouth response scared me, too. These people WERE scary. Who wants to see her picture online accompanied by digital catcalls demanding that she be “taken out”? And that was one of the milder posts.
But the truly chilling part of this entire saga is what happened next. Though our story had raised entirely appropriate questions about the president’s military record, though there had been substantiation for everything we reported, though this was an issue certainly worth discussing in wartime, all that was lost in the melee that followed.
Because of the angry conservative outcry, the corporation we worked for chose to walk away from an uncomfortable controversy rather than stick up for its reporters.
This is not a new fight. Journalism has always pissed people off. It is supposed to. It should be provocative. It should ask hard questions of everyone on every side. It shouldn’t play favorites and it shouldn’t fear honest criticism.
In a democracy, journalism cannot fear bullies or pull its punches because somebody powerful might get uncomfortable. That’s when we all lose.
In retrospect, I think the real problem with this story is that it ran three years too early. Imagine that a report emerged today saying that President Bush and his enablers had unusual problems finding the most basic records, that key documents had disappeared from official files, that he and his supporters dissembled when asked direct questions. Yawn. The country wouldn’t bat a collective eye. No one would be attacked for reporting that. That stuff is old hat now.
But back then in the face of an orchestrated attack, Viacom blinked. The company insisted that Dan Rather issue an on-air apology. We were investigated by a so-called independent panel that wasn’t independent and wasn’t really a panel. It was a cluster of securities fraud attorneys with no journalistic experience fronted by a couple of figureheads with strong ties to the Bush family.
In reaction to the Rather lawsuit being filed, I read that Republican former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, one of the two panel leaders, harrumphed that his investigation “speaks for itself.” It certainly does. I saw his stellar work firsthand.
Thornburgh and his minions went through all my business emails and at one point during an excruciating, all day session, he personally chose to grill me on an email in which I had used a bad word. I had referred to something as “horseshit” and I had meant it. “Why had I chosen to use THAT word?” he wanted to know. “Why did I feel it was it necessary to use profanity in an email?” Good Lord. No adult should ever be subjected to that kind of ridiculous ritual. What horseshit.
Oops. Sorry, Mr. Attorney General.
In the end, although the Thornburgh panel did clearly discover that the unwashed wretches in newsrooms sometimes use foul language, the intrepid group could not find evidence of bias in our work, could not find malicious intent and could not find that the documents were false. They found that we had “rushed” the story, that we tried too hard to get the story, that we suffered from “myopic zeal.”
Our myopic zeal was what gave us the energy and tenacity at CBS News to break the Abu Ghraib story and every other decent, difficult story I have done in my professional life. I think journalism today could use a little more real zeal.
It still sickens me that good people at CBS lost their jobs over this. It breaks my heart that people with a political ax to grind interfered with a story at a major network news outlet.
And I personally pray to God that somebody someday will get some real answers on where George W. Bush was for more than a year while other Americans were fighting and dying in Vietnam. That we have no answers this long after he has taken office and taken us into two wars should disturb every American.
But I’m afraid this entire episode just encapsulates what has happened to journalism in general in this country. It has become corporatized, trivialized and castrated.
I know that filing a suit had to be a tough decision for Dan to make. But I’m not sure he had a choice. This episode deserves to be examined again and this may be the only way to accomplish that. Besides, a lawsuit also gives him that delicious power of discovery. Who knows what might shake loose?
In the meantime, this is what I do know.
Dan Rather is a legendary reporter who has spent decades doing his job like few others — while bullets flew past his head, or while he was tied to a tree in a hurricane, or when he was chasing down big stories, sometimes on foot. He helped guide the country through communal catastrophes like the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and 9/11. He has paid his dues.
And at 75 years old, Rather still has more reportorial testosterone than the entire employee roster at FOX News. It is a tremendous injustice to journalism that he has to go to court to be treated with respect.
Courage, buddy. Courage to us all.
“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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October 6th, 2007
