Last week Dan Rather relied on the Noble Lie. This week he plays
the Noble Victim. No longer speaking of the “core truth” to which
his unimpeachable source drew his attention, he says that his
source “misled” him.
“I find we have been misled on the key question of how our
source for the documents came into possession of these papers,” he
says. “That, combined with some of the questions that have been
raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where — 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.”
Rather says his forgery was in the best traditions of CBS. His
“mistake” in “good faith” was undertaken in the “spirit of trying
to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without
fear or favoritism.”
Rather’s statement might be true if he said “with fear or
favoritism” instead of “without.” His report was certainly in the
spirit of CBS under him — it is the culmination of decades of
gunning for Republican presidents. It is a spirit of reporting with
fear of conservatives and favoritism toward liberals.
Last week Rather rehearsed this
CBS-is-on-the-right-side-of-history defense in the pages of the
New York Observer: “I think over the long haul, this will
be consistent with our history and our traditions and
reputation…We took heat during the McCarthy time, during
civil rights, during Watergate. We haven’t always been right, but
our record is damn good.”
In other words, Rather is saying: Don’t shoot at me; I am in the
white hat, on the liberal side of history, telling lies to the
unwashed for their own good. Moreover, as a CBS producer more or
less whined in the Washington Post, it is the White
House’s fault: they should have alerted CBS to Rather’s forgery.
Perhaps the White House should have said to Rather and CBS: “Don’t
go with this report. It is not worth destroying your reputation
just to nail the President on a missed physical. Whatever he did or
didn’t do in the Guard, it paled in comparison with, say, forging
government documents and passing them off on the nightly news.”
Now we know that Bill Burkett victimized Rather. How could
Rather have known that Burkett wasn’t an unimpeachable source?
After all, Burkett had proven his sterling credentials to Rather
with his obviously well-sourced story about finding damning Bush
documents in the dumpster behind National Guard headquarters in
Texas. And besides, Burkett’s lawyer, David Van Os, is a former
chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party. Rather knew from
personal experience that Travis County Democrats are
salt-of-the-earth people: Rather raised $20,000 for them in
2001.
Rather has mused on the matter of honesty, saying an “honest
person” can “tell any number of lies.” So when Rather says he
committed a good-faith mistake while raising money for Travis
County Democrats, we’ll chalk that up to his understanding of
honesty.
Then as now, he had no idea he was being victimized by
Democrats, even though his daughter Robin had co-hosted the
Democratic fundraiser. She apparently misled him too. Rather’s
reporting instincts failed him prior to the fundraiser. “I didn’t
ask the question, and I should have,” he said, arguing he was
ignorant of the event’s fundraising purpose until he got there, at
which point his fabled reporting skills kicked in, and he became
“very aware that it was a fundraising event” and proceeded to speak
anyway.
Rather, as a bona fide Texas Democratic fundraiser, has a direct
tie to the Democratic circle from which the forgery came. In the
best CBS traditions of playing dumb about bald bias, Rather will
say this has nothing to do with the story, didn’t influence his
verification methods for sources, and so on. After fundraising for
Democrats, he said, “I didn’t ask the question, and I should have.”
After using those same Texas Democrats as his sources for a fake
story, Rather says the same.
Rather is right. There is a “core truth” here. The core truth is
that Bush didn’t do anything in the National Guard remotely as
irresponsible as Rather’s forgery fiasco.
