18 YEARS: 18 THOUGHTS. Congratulations to Power Line for 18 years in the Blogosphere! Not least of which, this moment:
As we were flooded with emails following the post, I called John mid-morning for help sorting through the messages and assessing the information. John took a look and called me back 15 minutes later. “Dan Rather is toast,” he said. “The key to the case is kerning.”
Working for Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart linked to the post early that afternoon with a screaming siren on the Drudge Report. By the end of the day some 500,000 readers had visited the post. Inside CBS News they were trying to figure out what had happened. What had happened was one of the great journalistic frauds of all time, the unraveling of which led to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News. In his 2012 memoir, however, Rather stands behind the fraud. He titled the memoir Rather Outspoken. In it he retracts his 2004 on-air apology, writing that it was extracted from him involuntarily by CBS News management. That may be true, but Rather’s defense of the Bush National Guard story in “For the Record” strongly suggests Rather Full of It would be more like it.
9. John and I joked that when they got around to making a movie about Rathergate, Robert Redford might play him and Dustin Hoffman might play me. Wrong! When they made the movie — 2014’s inaptly titled Truth, based on segment producer Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty — Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett played the perpetrators of the fraud. When it comes to rewriting history, the left never quits and its media adjunct is always there to lend a hand.
10. Andrew Heyward was president of CBS News at the time of Rathergate. He hadn’t spoken much about the scandal for public consumption, but he talked about Truth to the New York Times when the Times celebrated the film at a TimesTalks event with Redford, Blanchett, Rather and Mapes. Heyward told the Times that the film “takes people responsible for the worst embarrassment in the history of CBS News, and what was at the time a grievous blow to the credibility of a proud news organization, and turns them into martyrs and heroes. Only Hollywood could come up with that.”
One might say that truer words were never spoken.
Read the whole thing.