Would Rather Follow Up On Memogate? He Says CBS "Wouldn't Let Me"

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/

Dan Rather, interviewed on C-SPAN tonight by Marvin Kalb, said that CBS "will not allow him to continue to pursue the story of President Bush's Air Guard service." NewsBusters has the transcript.

KALB: You have an opportunity now, you're a reporter for "60 Minutes," that's a very important program. Would you go now and go back to that story and do it again? And find the documentation that would, in fact, prove what you believe to be the accuracy of the story?

RATHER: Straight-up, no chaser, no. One, CBS News doesn't want me to do that story. They wouldn't let me do that story.

KALB: Why?

RATHER: That's a question you'd have to ask them. But I've moved on from it. And I've done my best to put it behind me. I've taken my licks, taken my shot.

KALB: OK.

I thought it was due to come out shortly?

From Amazon.com

<snip>

I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name “Buckhead,” set the tone for what was to come.

There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.

<snip>

I talked to our document analyst Marcel Matley, now back in San Francisco, who said he had seen some of the comments and dismissed them out of hand. “They aren’t even looking at the quality of copies I did,” Matley said. He disdained the anonymity of the postings, saying that any real analysts would use their name and credentials. And he pointed out something that would be a huge problem for us in the days ahead: that in the process of downloading, scanning, faxing, and photocopying, some computers, copiers, and faxes changed spacing and subtly altered fonts. He thought that this basic misunderstanding of how documents changed through electronic transmittal was behind the unfounded certainty and ferocity of the attack on the documents.

In retrospect, Matley was right and our story never recovered from this basic misunderstanding. Faxing changes a document in so many ways, large and small, that analyzing a memo that had been faxed---in some cases not once, but twice---was virtually impossible. The faxing destroyed the subtle arcs and lines in the letters. The characters bled into each other. The details of how the typed characters failed to line up perfectly inside each word were lost.

And these faxed, scanned, and downloaded documents were the only versions of the memos ever made public. A comparison of one of the documents before faxing and after faxing is in the appendix.

Either it's an important story or it isn't. If it isn't important, why did Rather do it in the first place? As insulated as Bush has been from all of the consequences of his misspent life, Rather had to know that airing the story of Bush's desertion was going to have repercussions. If he didn't, then he's an ignorant buffoon, hardly deserving of the large salary he was pulling down. And I don't think Dan Rather is an ignorant buffoon.

So Rather had to know that there was going to be a backlash on this story, and that he thought it was an important enough story to broadcast. But when his overlords at CBS said "pull the plug," Rather acquiesced without a whimper or a squawk. As evidence for that assertion, I point to Rather's answer to Kalb's question why CBS killed any follow-up, that Kalb would "have to ask them." Clearly, the powers that be at CBS didn't tell Rather why he couldn't defend his own story on an important issue, and Dan didn't see fit to find out why.

He certainly took his licks for the story, but he didn't take his shot at it. As one of only three men in the nation with a daily half hour to broadcast to the nation, Dan Rather was in a rarified position to do something about the candidacy of Bush, a man he knew to be a wartime deserter running for re-election. But instead of risking his millions of dollars in salary, he didn't do anything.

His salary had bought his integrity, and we are left to wonder: What might have happened had Rather been more devoted to the country and its well-being than he was to his salary? What can he buy, what financial security does he have today that he didn't have a year ago? How much money did he get for sticking out his tenure as the evening news anchor at CBS, and was that sum worth more to him personally than the good of the nation he sold down the river for another four years of the corrupt Bush administration?

Thank you very much, Mr. Rather. Your service is greatly appreciated. Now, disappear.

and if he doesn't fight it with all his might-I will never defend him (or CBS) again.