These go in Politics instead of News at the admin's request. Is Dan Rather a political figure? Well, he sure as hell isn't a journalist.)

[link|http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/679xorjg.asp|No one ever tells just one lie]

Excerpts:

If you want to understand why Rather is being so recalcitrant and
finding it so difficult to make a full acknowledgment of his role in
perpetrating a colossal journalistic and political fraud--and why he
was so adamantly opposed to an internal investigation of his
now-infamous story about George W. Bush's National Guard service--you
need to understand that Rather saw his network weather two previous and
surprisingly similar tempests.

It did so in the first case, in 1971, by refusing outright to have its
programming examined by Congress and winning plaudits and awards for
doing so. The offending program was a documentary entitled The Selling
of the Pentagon. It stands even today as a monument in the history of
American broadcasting, an award-winning subject of veneration in
journalism schools--despite the fact that the producer lied to sources
when he assembled the documentary and used some astoundingly dishonest
editing to change the meaning of statements by two Pentagon officials
caught on film by CBS (one of whom later sued the network to little
effect)...

In 1982, CBS aggressively and successfully fought back against a libel
suit filed by William Westmoreland, the retired general who had led U.S.
forces in Vietnam. Another CBS documentary, this one entitled The
Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, had accused Westmoreland of
knowingly understating the size of the Vietcong forces against which
U.S. troops battled during the 1968 Tet offensive. The libel suit only
went to trial because CBS News commissioned an internal investigation of
its own broadcast following a damning TV Guide story that found many
instances of unethical conduct comparable to those in The Selling of the
Pentagon...

Rather's strenuous efforts to block the launch of an internal
investigation of his September 8 report on 60 Minutes must be understood
in light of the consequences to his workplace 21 years ago. Those
consequences were severe. For a time, CBS lost its libel insurance. And
when, in 1987, CBS came under new management by the cost-cutter Larry
Tisch, the network's news division was the hardest hit...

In 1971, CBS News not only weathered the storm but triumphed over it. In
1982, CBS News survived the storm, wounded but still standing. In 2004,
CBS has been devastated by the storm, and there's reason to believe it
will never quite recover. The saga of CBS and its eternal return to
Vietnam is almost over...

Dan Rather imagines that he is still battling Spiro Agnew, with the
voice of the sainted Frank Stanton driving him onward. But here's the
thing: When Stanton took his uncompromising stand on behalf of a
scurrilous documentary that violated every journalistic standard of
decency, he did something corrupt, not noble. And if there had been a
blogosphere in 1971, he wouldn't have survived; The Selling of the
Pentagon would today be remembered as a low point in American
journalistic history rather than as a legend.




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