Dan Rather's Raw Deal

From AlterNet, America's greatest reporter, Greg Palast, on what's happened to one of America's most celebrated reporters:

They finally put Dan Rather out of his misery at CBS. CEO Leslie Moonves put on his best mourning face, offering upon Rather's departure, "He had a very distinguished career. I'm sorry he's leaving us." However sorry Moonves may be, he still sent Rather to the glue factory -- all for reporting the truth. But not all of it.

Rather's "unsubstantiated story of Bush's military service" (says USA Today) got him canned. Yet, all the poor man did was repeat a story the Brits put on BBC Television a year earlier -- that Poppy Bush put in the fix to get his son out of 'Nam and into the Texas Air Guard, spending his war years guarding Houston from Viet Cong attack.

But Dan never reported this: the documentation from inside the US Department of Justice detailing the fix. Why not? Because it opened up a far more serious charge: that those who kept Little George out of war's way ended up very well rewarded. The BBC, the world's biggest network, ran that full story -- from the evidence of the fix to the evidence of the lucrative pay-backs -- and the BBC never retracted a comma of it. Nor, by the way, has the White House denied our accusations despite our repeated offers to respond.

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Bigtime corporate news media face Dan Rather is as big of an asshole as they come, and very much a symbol of everything that's wrong with his field--he is, after all, the man who said on David Letterman in the weeks after 9/11, "He's my commander-in-chief. All he has to do is tell me where to line up and I'll do it;" people who actually remember the bland facts they learned in high school government class know that the term "commander-in-chief" only refers to a President's role as head of the military, and has nothing to do with the civilian population, which makes Rather's comment patriotically stupid at best. Despite all that, however, Rather is no idiot, seems to understand what's been going on with the corporate news media, and somewhere, deep inside his black soul, still has the journalistic ethics he learned back in more civilized days. That is, the man obviously still sees himself as a real reporter, and has clearly been trying to navigate ethically the treacherous career-waters of bigtime corporate news.

For all the good it did him.

Since Christmas, I've been slowly working my way through the book about "Rathergate" written by one of the two 60 Minutes producers who were fired over the scandal. I say "slowly" because its writer, Mary Mapes, is almost as big of a self-important asshole as Rather, whom she idolizes. In between all the self-congratulatory acts of blowhardism, however, lie some fascinating tidbits of knowledge: probably the most important of which is the lowdown on the allegedly forged smoking-gun memo which supposedly illustrates beyond a doubt that Bush went AWOL when he was in the Guard. If Mapes isn't simply making shit up, she constructs a very compelling argument that there is very little chance that the document is forged--in addition to detailing CBS's exhaustive authentication process, utterly ignored by the network's internal review board during the cover-up process in the wake of the controversy, she also easily dismisses the right-wing typewriter font arguments (yes, there were superscript typewriters back then), and shows how the conservative bloggers essentially weren't even analyzing the same memo (they were using a photocopy of a fax of the memo, which heavily distorted it beyond any reasonable analysis).

In short, the story that got Rather canned was absolutely accurate. That's what you get for trying to be an ethical journalist in today's political climate.

Look, as much as I hate Dan Rather, this is not only unjust, it's part of the biggest unreported story in US history, how the big news companies are in cahoots with corporate and government power. Rather and his crew reported the truth, which offended powerful people, so, instead of weathering the storm, CBS simply tried to make it all go away. That's why Dan Rather is now going away. In the end, his long and distinguished career just didn't matter. He, like everybody else who stands in the way of corporate will, is expendable. And that's a damned shame.

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