http://www.ratherbiased.com/
This is a reprint of the September 8th article that started the Rathergate affair. I found a very interesting point that I highlighted:
(My comments are interspaced in this article)
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The George Bush reelection team is bracing itself tonight as it prepares for another primetime assault by CBS News.
Five months after Dan Rather denounced the just-formed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as "an experienced and successful Republican operation made up of veterans attacking Vietnam war hero John Kerry," the 72-year-old anchor and avowed Democrat is set to unveil an extensive interview with Ben Barnes, a former Texas Democratic politician who claims he helped a young Bush avoid service in the Vietnam War by getting him into the Texas National Guard in 1968.
Tonight's Bush attack marks the latest broadside that Rather and his CBS colleagues have launched against the Bush family. Beginning with his infamous ambush of George H. W. Bush during the Republican primaries in 1988 (which CBS beforehand promised would be softball "candidate profile" interview), Dan Rather and his colleagues have had it in for the Bushes.
Later in the same year, on the eve of the Republicans' convention, Rather was the sole network anchor to report on a lone man who accused the then-veep of lying about his service in World War II.
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(Does that sound familiar?)
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Despite such efforts, Bush was elected but Rather and his colleagues continued to dog the president whose staff swore he would "never" allow the Texas Democrat to interview him. CBS, meanwhile, repeatedly rejected the administration's offers to allow other network correspondents to interview the president, insisting "only Dan Rather interviews the president."
After some time, CBS relented and sent Morning News anchors Harry Smith and Paula Zahn to the White House. Unbeknownst to the White House, however, Evening News producer Susan Zirinsky had tagged along.
Bush's press secretary at the time, Marlin Fitzwater recounted what followed in his memoirs:
"As the show was about to end, I discovered Susan Zirinsky, Rather's producer, crouched behind some Rose Garden hedges, shouting into her two-way radio: 'Ask him about Iran-Contra. Iran-Contra!' That confirmed everyone's feelings about the depth of Dan Rather's hatred for the president."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
(CBS's attacks are personal, they were not simply "misled" in the memogate affair.)
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Rather's intense distrust of Bush continued unabated into the latter's 1992 reelection effort when a woman named Gennifer Flowers emerged claiming to have had a long affair with Bush's challenger, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. The CBS anchor was deeply skeptical of Flowers's allegations and was convinced that the Bush campaign had planted both her story as well as charges that Clinton had deliberately dodged the Vietnam War draft.
Former CBS News political director Martin Plissner told the story in his 1999 book, The Control Room:
"Dan Rather was convinced that Roger Ailes, who had no formal role in this year's Bush campaign, had in some way inspired the Gennifer Flowers story. When the draft story appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Rather wanted to break a story on how the Bush campaign had planted that."
The Clinton campaign maintained that the draft allegations away as negative campaigning. Rather was more than happy to oblige. Introducing CBS's a report (which focused more on Democratic accussations of foul play than on the actual charges against Clinton), happily repeated the Clinton spin.
"Bill Clinton says President Bush's 1989 Willie Horton crowd is smearing him with new campaign dirty tricks."
It was, as Plissner wrote, "a headline that absolutely no one else could" give. "Rather was not pleased by CBS's failure to scoop the world on this, or on Roger Ailes's supposed planting of the Gennifer Flowers story."
The Tradition Continues
When asked what it was like campaigning for president as the son of a former president, George W. Bush postulated that "I inherited half of my father's friends and all of his enemies." That prediction has certainly proven correct regarding his father's enemies at CBS News.
From the beginning of his primary campaign, Rather and company have consistently sided with the younger George Bush's opponents, cheering on the "white knight" campaign of liberal Republican John McCain and denouncing Bush's larger tax reduction proposals, as well as efforts by some Bush supporters to get McCain off the ballot in parts of New York (a tactic being employed by Democrats against independent candidate Ralph Nader this year which Rather has yet to decry).
After Bush defeated McCain and clinched the GOP nomination, Rather's Bush grudge simmered, finally boiling over during the controversy over Florida's electoral votes. Initially neutral in the debate, Rather fell in line on the very day that the Al Gore campaign launched (as chronicled by Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz) a media strategy to cast doubt upon the objectivity of Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris and to create the impression that Bush was being handed the presidency.
Rather was only too happy to oblige. He threw himself into the effort, pointing out Harris's Republican partisanship 27 times during the 35-day dispute. Eager to please his fellow Democrats (for whom he would later keynote a fund-raising event in 2001), the newsman applied a disparate standard to the courts deciding the matter, pointing out 9 times that Republicans had appointed a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court while only once doing the same for the unanimously Democratic high court of Florida.
Like many Democrats, Rather remained unconvinced of Bush's legitimacy. He expressed these doubts during a January 2001 appearance on David Letterman's show in which he hinted that Bush had been "selected president."
Aside from a brief period after September 11 when both parties maintained an uneasy truce, the veteran anchor's distrust has continued unabated. He and his colleagues have consistently opposed Bush's fiscal policies, repeatedly tried to associate the GOP with "special interests" despite the fact that Democrats benefit much more from such groups, and lobbied hard in favor of federal prescription drug subsidies.
CBS News has also heavily promoted the president's critics both within and without the Republican party, playing up discontent within the GOP congressional ranks while almost totally ignoring the complaints of Democrats upset with their leadership. The network has feted anti-Bush authors and filmmakers like Michael Moore, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson, Al Franken, and Paul O'Neill with adoring primetime interviews on shows like 60 Minutes and uncritical "news" reports on other programs at the same time it has ignored or smeared Democrat critics like Zell Miller, John O'Neill, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter.
Given CBS's patently obvious record of liberal and Democratic bias (which even News Division president Andrew Heyward has acknowledged) and Dan Rather's personal grudge against the Bush family, we are not holding out much hope that tonight's 60 Minutes episode questioning President Bush's Vietnam record will be a fair program or that 60 will even bother mentioning the allegations of hundreds of men who doubt the wartime honesty of Bush's opponent John Kerry, especially considering that it has not shown any interest in interviewing them during primetime.
"CBS has never contacted any of our members for an interview." Swift Boat Veterans for Truth spokesman John O'Neill tells RatherBiased.com. "There's not a chance of it."
It's nasty enough to gag a buzzard.
--------------------------------------------------------
(This type of behavior should not be acceptable, and the American people should not let CBS get away with the Victim excuse that is being drumed up today.)
This is a reprint of the September 8th article that started the Rathergate affair. I found a very interesting point that I highlighted:
(My comments are interspaced in this article)
----------------------------------------------------------
The George Bush reelection team is bracing itself tonight as it prepares for another primetime assault by CBS News.
Five months after Dan Rather denounced the just-formed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as "an experienced and successful Republican operation made up of veterans attacking Vietnam war hero John Kerry," the 72-year-old anchor and avowed Democrat is set to unveil an extensive interview with Ben Barnes, a former Texas Democratic politician who claims he helped a young Bush avoid service in the Vietnam War by getting him into the Texas National Guard in 1968.
Tonight's Bush attack marks the latest broadside that Rather and his CBS colleagues have launched against the Bush family. Beginning with his infamous ambush of George H. W. Bush during the Republican primaries in 1988 (which CBS beforehand promised would be softball "candidate profile" interview), Dan Rather and his colleagues have had it in for the Bushes.
Later in the same year, on the eve of the Republicans' convention, Rather was the sole network anchor to report on a lone man who accused the then-veep of lying about his service in World War II.
---------------------------------------------------
(Does that sound familiar?)
---------------------------------------------------
Despite such efforts, Bush was elected but Rather and his colleagues continued to dog the president whose staff swore he would "never" allow the Texas Democrat to interview him. CBS, meanwhile, repeatedly rejected the administration's offers to allow other network correspondents to interview the president, insisting "only Dan Rather interviews the president."
After some time, CBS relented and sent Morning News anchors Harry Smith and Paula Zahn to the White House. Unbeknownst to the White House, however, Evening News producer Susan Zirinsky had tagged along.
Bush's press secretary at the time, Marlin Fitzwater recounted what followed in his memoirs:
"As the show was about to end, I discovered Susan Zirinsky, Rather's producer, crouched behind some Rose Garden hedges, shouting into her two-way radio: 'Ask him about Iran-Contra. Iran-Contra!' That confirmed everyone's feelings about the depth of Dan Rather's hatred for the president."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
(CBS's attacks are personal, they were not simply "misled" in the memogate affair.)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Rather's intense distrust of Bush continued unabated into the latter's 1992 reelection effort when a woman named Gennifer Flowers emerged claiming to have had a long affair with Bush's challenger, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. The CBS anchor was deeply skeptical of Flowers's allegations and was convinced that the Bush campaign had planted both her story as well as charges that Clinton had deliberately dodged the Vietnam War draft.
Former CBS News political director Martin Plissner told the story in his 1999 book, The Control Room:
"Dan Rather was convinced that Roger Ailes, who had no formal role in this year's Bush campaign, had in some way inspired the Gennifer Flowers story. When the draft story appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Rather wanted to break a story on how the Bush campaign had planted that."
The Clinton campaign maintained that the draft allegations away as negative campaigning. Rather was more than happy to oblige. Introducing CBS's a report (which focused more on Democratic accussations of foul play than on the actual charges against Clinton), happily repeated the Clinton spin.
"Bill Clinton says President Bush's 1989 Willie Horton crowd is smearing him with new campaign dirty tricks."
It was, as Plissner wrote, "a headline that absolutely no one else could" give. "Rather was not pleased by CBS's failure to scoop the world on this, or on Roger Ailes's supposed planting of the Gennifer Flowers story."
The Tradition Continues
When asked what it was like campaigning for president as the son of a former president, George W. Bush postulated that "I inherited half of my father's friends and all of his enemies." That prediction has certainly proven correct regarding his father's enemies at CBS News.
From the beginning of his primary campaign, Rather and company have consistently sided with the younger George Bush's opponents, cheering on the "white knight" campaign of liberal Republican John McCain and denouncing Bush's larger tax reduction proposals, as well as efforts by some Bush supporters to get McCain off the ballot in parts of New York (a tactic being employed by Democrats against independent candidate Ralph Nader this year which Rather has yet to decry).
After Bush defeated McCain and clinched the GOP nomination, Rather's Bush grudge simmered, finally boiling over during the controversy over Florida's electoral votes. Initially neutral in the debate, Rather fell in line on the very day that the Al Gore campaign launched (as chronicled by Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz) a media strategy to cast doubt upon the objectivity of Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris and to create the impression that Bush was being handed the presidency.
Rather was only too happy to oblige. He threw himself into the effort, pointing out Harris's Republican partisanship 27 times during the 35-day dispute. Eager to please his fellow Democrats (for whom he would later keynote a fund-raising event in 2001), the newsman applied a disparate standard to the courts deciding the matter, pointing out 9 times that Republicans had appointed a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court while only once doing the same for the unanimously Democratic high court of Florida.
Like many Democrats, Rather remained unconvinced of Bush's legitimacy. He expressed these doubts during a January 2001 appearance on David Letterman's show in which he hinted that Bush had been "selected president."
Aside from a brief period after September 11 when both parties maintained an uneasy truce, the veteran anchor's distrust has continued unabated. He and his colleagues have consistently opposed Bush's fiscal policies, repeatedly tried to associate the GOP with "special interests" despite the fact that Democrats benefit much more from such groups, and lobbied hard in favor of federal prescription drug subsidies.
CBS News has also heavily promoted the president's critics both within and without the Republican party, playing up discontent within the GOP congressional ranks while almost totally ignoring the complaints of Democrats upset with their leadership. The network has feted anti-Bush authors and filmmakers like Michael Moore, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson, Al Franken, and Paul O'Neill with adoring primetime interviews on shows like 60 Minutes and uncritical "news" reports on other programs at the same time it has ignored or smeared Democrat critics like Zell Miller, John O'Neill, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter.
Given CBS's patently obvious record of liberal and Democratic bias (which even News Division president Andrew Heyward has acknowledged) and Dan Rather's personal grudge against the Bush family, we are not holding out much hope that tonight's 60 Minutes episode questioning President Bush's Vietnam record will be a fair program or that 60 will even bother mentioning the allegations of hundreds of men who doubt the wartime honesty of Bush's opponent John Kerry, especially considering that it has not shown any interest in interviewing them during primetime.
"CBS has never contacted any of our members for an interview." Swift Boat Veterans for Truth spokesman John O'Neill tells RatherBiased.com. "There's not a chance of it."
It's nasty enough to gag a buzzard.
--------------------------------------------------------
(This type of behavior should not be acceptable, and the American people should not let CBS get away with the Victim excuse that is being drumed up today.)
