NEWS: Dan Rather: Crazy Coot or Genius?

POLITICS: Dan Rather: Crazy Coot or Genius?

Dan Rather has seemed deranged for years – in 1986 he famously spent a week ending his broadcasts by saying, for no good reason, “courage,” and has uttered also some of the most bizarre metaphors ever heard on television. But his insanity has been coupled with a compulsive insistence about the truth and standing up to authority.

In a sign of either great bravery or a tenuous grip on reality, Rather is suing CBS’s parent company Viacom for $70 million in damages. The case, Rather says, is less about money than it is about reclaiming his reputation, or what was left of it after he sang “What’s the Frequency Kenneth” with REM on the Late Show with David Letterman. To that end, he’s threatening to call call the president as a witness if his lawsuit goes to trial, and appears to be serious.

The lawsuit contends that he was unfairly forced out of his job at CBS news over allegedly forged documents used in a story investigating George W. Bush’s time spent in the National Guard. You probably remember the story; the font and kerning of the documents were thought to have been anachronistic, and therefore likely to have been fabricated.

The lawsuit threatens to reopen the inquiry into Bush’s military service, and in a modern day America that’s a lot angrier with George Bush than the one in which the debate originally appeared. The documents weren’t the whole of the report, as the New York Review of Books noted in 2005, the on-camera interviews from Bush’s superior officers and other supporting evidence was authentic.

But that’s not all. Rather apparently hopes to prove that the allegedly fake documents were authentic, despite all the quibbling over type-setting. According to a recent Sydney Blumenthal Salon article, it appears that CBS’s inquiry into the story deliberately overlooked evidence that supported the authenticity of the documents.

Rather also apparently plans on using the lawsuit as a referendum on how corporations have destroyed the ability of journalists report news. CBS apparently had an admitted vested interest in Bush’s re-election, and the inference can easily be made that they buried stories that had potential to harm Bush’s 2004 campaign.

According to the suit, CBS news was ready to air the Abu Ghraib story, but held it after military and corporate pressure. When it finally did broadcast the story – after the New Yorker broke it – the story was only broadcast once, with minimal promotion.

Of course, the suit means a lot to questions about journalism, intimidation and the pestering swarms of right wing bloggers. But the larger question, of what this is going to mean for crazy old coots who want to call the president as a witness in their crazy old coot court cases is unclear.

Just watch stories of this lawsuit get buried too...

I hope he does call the President, or at least attempt to. It would be interesting to see the White House try to dodge their way out of such a direct and explicit confrontation with the President, and about such a touchy issue as avoiding military service. If they claim the President doesn't have to answer any questions, I can't imagine that will look good.

I think it would be awesome if the President took the 5th amendment.

Good ole journalistic gatekeeping.

Genius.

Public displays of insanity have their interesting side...

It would be nice if journalists and their corporate bosses would leave their politics at home and do their jobs professionally. Neither did in this case.

Dan Rather - the new Gonzo?

Fuck that shit. It's impossible for a human being not to have an opinion about politics when they're at the forefront of the process all their lives. The least I could ask for is some kind of solid proof that these people are not god damn alien robots. Especially in the age of sensationalism: that guy who shredded the Paris Hilton story on-air - whether staged or not is irrelevant - is a personal hero.

We exist in an age that has seen objective journalism fail utterly and miserably, because politics have become more and more extreme, and all objective journalism succeeds in doing is presenting the viewpoint of the politicians while doing very little to balance it out with some semblance of sanity.

Take the Swift Boat Veterans crap a few years ago. It effectively eradicated any hope that Kerry had, and it was because journalists sat on their hands and tried to take an "objective" stance on the issue. Which, of course, resulted in a shitload of wasted time, because when you're trying to allow people to make up their own minds about a lie, all you succeed in doing is propagating that lie - for a good three or four months in the case of the ads. I wish a "journalist" had the balls to, on national television, say, "This Swift Boat crap is nothing but a load of bullshit. They're lying. Don't believe them. They're the same people who accused John McCain of having an Ethiopian love child in 2000. None of them served with Kerry, they're full of shit." But of course none of them did, in the interest of "objective" journalism.

Besides, in the era of Bill O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto, you need journalists to express explicitly liberal ideas on-air to balance it out. Otherwise you have the far right journalists, who have no objectivity, and the ones trying to keep up some half-dead facade of the thing. That shifts the balance of Power Of Viewpoint to the right inherently, which defeats the purpose of objectivity in the first place.

So fuck it, it's worthless.

Can I get a daily calendar of Dan Rather quote as a companion to my daily Bushisms calender?

I wish Mr. Rather the best of luck.

Dan Rather is a goddamn genius. It's about time a journalist in this day and age had the BALLS to call bullshit on their crooked-ass company for covering up the truth.

And as for the quotes, at least when you REALLY listen they make sense. He's not crazy, he's just using old southern figures of speech. The President, on the other hand...

Can we go for a little from Column A, a little from Column B?

Southern figures of speech are fucking stupid. Fred Thompson has built a campaign on them.

Okay, why did my post copy the entire post from FTR?

And when edited, why did it disappear?

Dan has caught the Genius Cootie and it is making him act Crazy.

theres nothing wrong with good old fashioned colloquialisms in fact my favorite of all time just happens to be:

"sweating like a whore in church"

sure Dan's a colorful guy, but all things considered its fun to watch crazy old men fight with corrupt companies.

I've been seeing that when replying to threads for a while now. if you reload the page after posting, without editing, it goes away.

because viacom owns the interbutt?

What post from FTR?

Dan Rather is ok in my book. I'm glad that an elder statesman (or at least elder talking head) of journalism is finally calling modern news reporting what it is: corporately sanitized programming aimed at promoting the status quo, not upsetting Washington, attracting lucrative sponsors/commercials, and pacifying the masses with a mixture of faux patriotism, fear mongering, celebrity worship, and the odd human interest/natural disaster piece thrown in for good measure. Its sad but it seems the only way to frame an issue is to instinctively mistrust mass media accounts and discount their reporting as serving some greater economic/political good.

*end rant*

Rather is the Man. The good kind.