Schizophrenic Dan Rather

Dan Rather on the dangers of Big Media:

Investigative reporting, finding out what people in power don’t want the public at large to know and disseminating it, is one of the most important roles of journalism in its role as the so-called Fourth Estate. And investigative reporting has gone badly out of fashion. The trend line is against it.

There are reasons. The reasons: It takes longer, it’s more expensive than other kinds of coverage, and it causes trouble because the big, huge international conglomerate that now owns so many of the news outlets, they have special needs in Washington. They are asking for favors, these people, needing favors — regulatory, legislative needs — of the very people that good investigative reporters would be digging into and exposing, if you will. And this comes in conflict.

But when an army of independent journalists investigated one of Dan’s stories, Rather accused them of being on Karl Rove’s payroll. (Dan doesn’t know the half of it!) And his producer questioned their authenticity, merely because she had never heard of them as late of September of 2004, near the end of the election year.

But all of a sudden, Dan’s not a fan of corporate journalism–wonder why?