LAT: Rather Rides Out Latest Partisan Storm [View All]

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-rather15sep15,1,6928722,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

CBS News' Dan Rather has famously tangled with Republicans since Richard Nixon was president. Now the anchor finds himself in the midst of another major partisan storm, accused of airing forged documents to support a report on President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the early 1970s.

In the week since the Sept. 8 report on the newsmagazine "60 Minutes," Rather has twice gone on air to defend his reporting and the documents themselves, which critics have argued could not have been produced by the typewriter technology commonly in use at the time. Tuesday, CBS News executives were preparing yet another rebuttal, expected to be released Wednesday.

But the issue doesn't show signs of dying down soon, partly because of the 72-year-old anchor's volatile history with the Bush family, and decades-old criticisms that Rather pursues a liberal agenda.

"Some people erroneously see Dan as having an agenda," said CBS News President Andrew Heyward. "He is a fair-minded, tough-minded reporter doing his job. But he is also a celebrity," he said, who has been used as a "poster child for mainstream media agendas."

LAT Editorial

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-cbs15sep15,1,2554965,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Black Eye for CBS News

September 15, 2004

CBS News has been had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion about newly discovered documents that CBS and anchor Dan Rather are defending as revealing the truth about George W. Bush's military service.

Despite Rather's statement Monday that the network "believes the documents are authentic," the evidence keeps mounting that they are not. As The Times reported, conservative bloggers detected glaring inconsistencies, such as a Microsoft Word type style. So many other discrepancies have since emerged that it would require a willful suspension of disbelief to take them as merely coincidental.

For example, the alleged memos from Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who was Bush's squadron commander, contain stylistic problems, such as the fact that Killian signs his rank not in accordance with National Guard procedure. In addition, Killian's signature on a memo dated May 4, 1972, is different from one on file in the Pentagon. The part of a memo supposedly written by Killian that refers to pressure from an earlier Bush commander to help out the young fighter pilot is highly dubious. The 1973 memo is dated almost a year and a half after the commander had resigned from active duty. The best CBS can do is to declare that he remained a powerful behind-the-scenes figure. Well, maybe. But how does CBS know that? CBS could tell us more about where these documents came from without having to reveal the names of its sources.

<snip>

CBS may have managed to place Bush's Vietnam-era service off-limits as a campaign issue, after weeks when John F. Kerry's impressive record has been under savage attack. Bush gave a smirky speech Monday to the National Guard Assn., waxing on about the patriotic sacrifices of the Guard's men and women over the years.