RATHERGATE UPDATE: DAN RATHER’S COCOON:
These days, network news survives in hermetically sealed cocoons—free of commercial pressures and calls for financial viability. CBS News has more cocoons than any other network. There’s Evening News, which languished in last place for years; Face the Nation, another ratings disaster; Sunday Morning, which remained unchanged even after the death of anchor Charles Kuralt; and 60 Minutes, which is profitable but has an employee-retirement program similar to that of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The CBS cocoons engender a kind of madness. Rather is paid an outsized salary—he makes $7 million per year—that is in no way commensurate with the number of viewers he delivers. Where most prime-time shows have a few weeks to prove their viability, newscasts often are given years and decades. The network’s former glory allows Rather to shroud himself in the aura of Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. “I’m confident we worked longer, dug deeper, and worked harder than almost anybody in American journalism does,” Rather told the Washington Post Sunday, when in fact CBS spent less time verifying the Guard documents than most bloggers.
Indeed. Don’t miss the conclusion.
UPDATE: Read this transcript and this one.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Rather appears to have been guided by the belief that he was doing his institution a great favor by holding out instead of retracting the story. Why any institution should believe that shirking the truth in the short run is a path to strength in the long run is beyond me.”
Meanwhile, Patterico observes:
These are not people who were duped. And the problem is not how they handled it once they were caught — though they handled that part badly. Their main transgression was in ignoring the evidence staring them in the face before the story ever ran. At the very least, they could have given some time on the broadcast to the dissenters.
But they didn’t. And I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: don’t fool yourself believing that this is the first time this has happened. Come on. If you have watched “60 Minutes” then you are familiar with that feeling you have at the end of a segment, when you think to yourself: “Wow, everything seems to point to one conclusion.” You thought that was because everything really did point to one conclusion?
Nope. It’s because everything else was left on the cutting room floor.
We’re just seeing one very notorious example where they got caught.
Yes, it’s a thirteenth chime of the clock.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Larry Walsh emails: “More to Patterico’s point, as another pundit once noted, ‘crisis doesn’t build character, it reveals it.'”