Rather Charges CBS Wanted to ‘Curry Favor’ with WH: Lawsuit proceeds would promote independent press

NYT: September 19, 2007
Rather Charges That CBS Wanted to ‘Curry Favor’ With White House
By Brian Stelter

The television industry will be poring over the $70 million lawsuit filed today by Dan Rather. (NOTE: The Times has a link to a PDF of the suit here.) The 32-page filing lists 123 information items and seven causes of action and, in its conclusion, explicitly claims that CBS was motivated by political considerations:

"Upon information and belief, the deceitful acts described in the foregoing paragraphs on the part of CBS and Mr. Moonves and Mr. Heyward, and promoted by Viacom and Mr. Redstone, were motivated by an intention to damage Mr. Rather, in order to curry favor with the Bush administration.

The chain of events that led to Mr. Rather’s termination and the damage to his reputation, the lies Mr. Moonves, Mr. Heyward and other executives told him in the aftermath of the Broadcast that led him to publicly and personally apologize, CBS’ biased investigation, and the lies he was told regarding his employment, were calculated by Mr. Moonves, Mr. Heyward and others at CBS, and promoted or directed by Mr. Redstone and Viacom to damage Mr. Rather’s career and reputation.

CBS had knowledge of the derogatory statements concerning Mr. Rather made by its employees, including those made by Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and others, and by permitting those statements to continue, significantly contributed to the barrage of bad press Mr. Rather faced following the Broadcast."

Rather’s lawsuit is the talk of the television news world today. Reuters is reporting that Rather “will donate much of the proceeds to the cause of promoting an independent press” if he wins the suit....

http://tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/rather-charges-that-cbs-wanted-to-curry-favor-with-white-house/

to promote Independent Press"..talk about Karma that needs to spread some seed money!

Oh, I like that Rather..I hope he has a chance.

I'm trying to wrap by brain around this, though..
"CBS had knowledge of the derogatory statements concerning Mr. Rather made by its employees, including those made by Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and others, and by permitting those statements to continue, significantly contributed to the barrage of bad press Mr. Rather faced following the Broadcast."

That's too bad!

and attacking those who threaten their control.

.

desk.

Yikes.

criminal we have now in the WH.

Katie Couric's glowing assessment of conditions in Iraq during her recent visit is a case in point. I thought she wouldn't go because she's a single mom. I guess if you have an agenda, that mom thing kinda takes a back seat.

a deposition of the RW blogger who posted, within minutes, about the arcane typographical clues (an IBM typewriter of the period's ability to do proportional spacing and superscripting) that sent the story into a spiral of recrimination and corporate CYA that did Rather in, and saved *'s ass.

That's how it gets back to Rove.

Bring it on.

to keep people uninformed, case in point my republican brother in law, who is a decent hard working kind of guy, who would give you the shirt off his back, and what little time he does have to keep up with current events he has to get it from these so called news channels that are deliberately keeping him uninformed , its time to put a stop to the way they use our airwaves. K&R

They assume they're getting responsible journalism. It doesn't occur to them that they are not.

... who "probed" that the two documents whose provenance has not been shown to be 100% authentic. I'm sure the answers would provide some very useful and enlightening information on the right wing network of liars and hatemongers.

But I'll bet Rather's people already have that detail in the broader game plan.

And ask him to provide the papers he says existed.

Hoo-boy, I'd love to see that happen.

This is one of them.

You go, Dan Rather!

This guy, Volkenflick (phonetic spelling), reported that CBS didn't vet their story and that Rather was an irresponsible anchor for not doing a better job of fact-checking a reoort based on a "fake document" and then blaming underlings and his boss.

Gee. Which part of the story was wrong? That Ben Barnes did Poppy a favor and moved Smirko to the top of the TANG list? There's a videotape interview in which the former Texas House Speaker says that. That the drunken coke-whore never had to go to Officer Candidate School? Every other officer had too.

Then there are all the papers that are from the record. They show monkey requested he never fly or serve in Vietnam, including there Chimpy's signature. His TANG commanders didn't say much good about him. His Georgia ANG commanders never saw him.

Then there are the missing papers, scrubbed by Rove knows who.

NONE of that got brought up. Only that Dan Rather is suing and he doesn't really have much of a case.

Volkenflick did say the Boston Globe aired similar stories and those charges "sticked." One sentence of truth.

In another United States of America, I'd be shocked to hear lies repeated on a publicly funded radio report.

:yourock: I'm only sorry you apologized

This was the real scapegoat in this mess...she was the one who came up with the memos...and then got railroaded.

Here's hoping Dan and his lawyers have some new information that will bring to light a far greater conspiracy than just CBS. Every time I see that fukstick Jerome Kersey interviewed, I can't forget the slime stuff he did in attacking Mapes (he got tipped off to the "fraudulent memo" before the CBS story aired...how'd he know?) and then onto the Slimeboaters.

I'll need to go into the Wayback machine and brush up on the incidentals of the time. Surely old-time DUers will remember more details here...

Cheers...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents#Panel.27s_view_of_the_documents_themselves


also:


http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/21/cbs.documents/

WTF? Who the hell is "Lucy Ramirez", how did she get the documents, and why did he burn the originals?
Who was this unidentified man?
My tin foil hat says this whole thing was a Rovian style well-poisoning exercise, which worked beautifully. I know tin foil hats are out of fashion these days.

Dan Rather's are out there? How many journalists have gotten fired for writing the wrong kind of piece?

... Curious what they say about it.