CBS Tries to Rehabilitate Disgraced Dan Rather

The network fired him for trying to rig the 2004 presidential election

BREITBART

Disgraced former anchorman Dan Rather is 92 years old, and CBS, the network that fired him for trying to rig the 2004 presidential election, has joined the shameless rehab campaign.

During the waning weeks of the 2004 presidential election, Dan Rather was determined to ensure incumbent Republican president George W. Bush did not win reelection. And so, on 60 Minutes II, he ran a story that claimed Bush went AWOL during his time in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was true, and Rather had the documents to prove it. The story was also phony and timed to devastate the wartime president. Bush Jr. was exposed as a liar and shirker, in contrast with his Democrat opponent, John Kerry, who served a few months in Vietnam.

There was just one problem…

After the story was fact checked and authenticated by Rather, his 60 Minutes team, and CBS, some lowly bloggers (a new thing at the time) at Free Republic, Power Line, and elsewhere proved the documents were not just forgeries, but weak and lazy forgeries. Rather’s smoking guns were not the product of Vietnam-era typewriters. Instead, they had been created by Microsoft Word.

Caught red-handed, instead of apologizing and retracting his lie, Rather stood firm and then went “expert shopping” for someone — anyone! — who might save his con job. Pre-Internet, Rather, and CBS might have gotten away with this. But the World Wide Web delivered a whole new level of accountability to the corporate media. Every attempt to rationalize or wish the story away was met with public pushback that could not be ignored. Eventually, CBS was forced to admit the documents were fake. Rather, however, to his eternal shame, would continue to insist the story of Bush going AWOL was accurate, even if the documents were fake.

Bush won reelection, CBS released a damning internal investigation, but Rather still stood behind the story and was finally forced out the following year. Two years later, Rather sued CBS for $70 million, claiming they had made him a “scapegoat” for the story. The lawsuit was eventually tossed.

Since then, Rather has been at his most authentic, using various platforms, including social media, to forever prove what many of us knew decades before the Rathergate affair: that Dan Rather is a bitter and dishonest far-left extremist.

But.

Because others must be encouraged to do the same, the left will always rehabilitate those who sell their souls for the good of The Cause. Even proven liars, plagiarists, and bigots like Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, Al Sharpton, Fareed Zakaria, Joy Reid, etc., are rehabbed.

Dan Rather could not be left out in the cold. This rehab attempt is a signal to everyone else in the media: fall on your sword with lies and fraud, and we will still take care of you and your legacy.

Hollywood attempted to rehab Rather by having him played by no less than Robert Redford in a Rathergate movie that claimed the Bush story was true. Truth flopped. (I loved it.)

Before CNN fired disgraced conspiracy theorist Brian Stelter, he did his part to rehab Dan Rather by treating him like an expert guest and Grand Poobah of journalism.

Netflix is going all in with a 95-minute Dan Rather documentary.

And now, CBS, who suffered untold reputational damage at the hands of Rather’s hysterical and dishonest partisanship, is climbing aboard the rehab train….

CONTINUE READING ORGINAL ARTICLE

Header featured image (edited) credit: Rather/Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

Emphasis added by (TLB)

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