Rathergate

Far left polemic Dan Rather was fired for trying to rig an election by running a timed Bush fake hit-piece on 60 minutes.

Far left polemic Dan Rather tried to rig an election by running a timed Bush hit piece on 60 minutes, just before the 2004 election, using shoddy and unvetted "Killian documents" which claimed that Bush was incompetent, insubordinate and didn't complete his National Guard Service in 1973. When the Internet debunked it, Dan had finally blown up his career. He still stands by the falsehoods.

ℹ️ Info

~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2004-09-08

The Internet decomposed the typography in the "Killian documents" and showed that it was a forgery within hours, and commanders and folks involved refuted the accounts, and Dan Rather, some of his staff, and even some execs had to reluctantly be fired for journalistic fraud and incompetence. If CBS had any fact checkers left, they would have known the same thing. This didn't meet journalistic standards.

Dan was shocked that collaborating with the John Kerry campaign to undermine an election, with poorly sourced and laughably false exposé about how "George Bush dodged his duty with the Air National Guard", would have consequences. He'd build his career one such sloppy journalistic standards. And for a while, he was right: CBS put their credibility on-the-line defending the documents and their man, and the other mainstream outlets tried to ignore the story... but the right wing blogosphere had started, and they showed how obviously forged the documents were, and eventually CBS had to capitulate. It all turned out to be falsified hokum, Dan had let his bias get in the way of journalistic standards, again.

Inauthentic[edit | edit source]

On top of that, in the original report, Rather had spun it as "the material" has been authenticated by experts retained by CBS, and those experts had since claimed they had NOT authenticated the documents.

In desperation, a week after the airing and before he lost his job, he brought on Killian's Secretary (Marian Knox) from the airbase who said she knew the documents were fake... but claimed silly things like the documents were, "Fake but Accurate". (They could have been typed from real memos). And then admitted she had no firsthand knowledge of Bush's time in the Guard. Thus "Fake but Accurate" became the rallying cry of CBS News thanks to Rather, and was the final nail that guaranteed he'd be fired.

When you fuck up, put down the megaphone. Rather went on to be a bitter fallen FakeNewsman, sniping from insignificance from the sidelines -- and proving what the informed knew all along, he was never a real unbiased journalist that could put his emotions aside. Just another ignorant crotchety old liberal trying to twist the truth for his political agenda.

The documents are believed to have come from Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, who claimed to have sent them and conveniently burned the originals so they could never trace back and punish the forger.

Lawsuit[edit | edit source]

Dan sued CBS in 2007^[1] for besmirching his lousy reputation, and it was thrown out of court. Dan still whines about how he believes the documents are genuine, despite them being done on a laser printer and typeface that never existed in the 1960's. To this day, Dan claims that he was right, and despite using falsified documents, that the Bush administration never denied it... when they had. What he misses completely, is even if they had been real, he had no evidence they were, and was wrong to not vet the documents and run them in the story. That's not news, that's rumor mongering (FakeNews).