I’m with Old Dad on this one. I think Dan Rather himself came up with the documents–not that he personally forged them, but that some Democratic operative gave them to him and for him the story was “too hot to check.” For him it was deja-Nixon all over again.

A “talent” (that’s what they’re called in the biz) at the level of Rather or Bill O’Reilly does have the power to push the story through over the objections of the producers. They’re like the franchise player of a football or baseball team. From the outside they look like just another guy on the team, albeit the star. From the inside, when they say jump the rest of the team asks how high. He won’t resign; he’s already said he’d retire after the election anyway. So the CBS News Division figures all they have to do is deny, deny, deny and the furor will eventually die.

There will be repurcussions, though. To Rather, whose reputation is tarnished, both with a large segment of the public and with his peers. To CBS, who could well lose a few tenths of a point in the ratings if enough regular viewers switch their news watching habits to one of the other alphabets, translating into a not insignificant revenue loss. And to the MSM as a whole, as distrust for the institution by the public at large is bound to grow over this. Especially among the 20 and 30 somethings who are more likely to have watched the story unfold over the internet. It might even have cost Kerry some votes too, because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess where those documents came from.

The winner in this is George Bush, because the forgeries have so tainted the AWOL issue that he can now remain above it all and look presidential while doing so.