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"I don’t have a political agenda. What I’m trying to be is an honest broker of information."
He also said, a little oddly we think, that he wouldn’t surrender an inch to those who suggest his liberal bias got the best of him, even if it means "getting hammered" into "dog meat."
More than one media observer has noticed that Dan Rather’s behavior during this fiasco has been downright Nixonian. First, he denied what was obvious to all, that the documents CBS based its report on were forgeries. Then he and his network stonewalled while attacking the credibility of their critics.
Brokaw announced to the assembled crowd and media, "I don’t think anyone should judge a man by one event in his career."
When that prompted a rousing round of applause, Rather was reportedly moved to near tears.
Well, everyone could use a hug now and then. And it’s nice of Rather’s fellow anchors to come to his defense in his time of need. But this was not the first time Rather or CBS News had made such a mistake.
Back in 1988, CBS ran a news special called "The Walls Within" that purported to tell the stories of six Vietnam veterans, some of whom admitted to committing horrible atrocities in gory detail during their tours of duty. The special was very well received by media critics, but there turned out to be serious problems with the report.
It turned out only one of the men had actually served in combat, and even his story was suspect. The others all had been stationed far away from the events they claimed they participated in or saw happen.
The truth was uncovered by a man named B.G. Burkett (not to be confused with the Bill Burkett in CBS’ latest screw-up). Using the Freedom of Information Act to check the records of the men, Burkett, a Vietnam veteran himself, discovered most of them had lied about their experiences. Rather’s team was either complicit in the hoax or willingly duped by a handful of men whose records it could have easily checked but didn’t.
When Burkett pointed out the mistakes to CBS, the network closed ranks and basically told Burkett to pound sand. Burkett later went on to write a book called "Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History," pointing out the media failures when it came to its portrayals of returning veterans.
That all happened before the Internet boom and the Web loggers appeared ready, willing and able to debunk suspicious and outright false claims that previously were accepted as facts because they were being reported by trustworthy men, like Dan Rather.
Let us say right here that we here at the Daily Times have over the years made our own share of mistakes, reporting inaccuracies and even news stories that didn’t turn out to be true. Such mistakes come with the business. We are far from perfect.
But when caught in an error, the first job of a responsible journalist is to own up to it and correct it.
What CBS and Rather did in this latest case with its shoddy reporting and document authentication practices was just awful. Worse was its stonewalling and then its continued assertions that the story was true, that its sources were "unimpeachable."
A lot of good journalism was done in the debunking of CBS’s original story. That’s the good news.
The bad news is the other networks, in the persons of Brokaw and Jennings, have joined Rather and CBS in attacking those who first uncovered the truth. They are trying to dismiss his critics as a pack of partisan attack dogs.
That won’t wash or work because there are too many real journalists appalled by what Rather and CBS have done.
They don’t make the millions of dollars the networks anchors make, but they take their jobs of getting it right at least as seriously as Rather, Jennings, et al. And they, by that we mean WE, won’t let them hide behind an excuse we would never accept from a business leader or a politician.
