Post by Barefoot In Kailua on Mar 10, 2005 15:54:32 GMT -5
As Taliban Dan walks away for good. 
Not Biased? Dan Rather, In His Own Words
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 10, 2005
America's media elite is awash in a flood of tears over Dan Rather's departure tonight as anchor of the CBS Evening News, which they would like to convince the nation is a tragedy of Homeric proportions.
For Red State America, however, it's a night to rejoice – one of the nation's most demonstrably biased broadcast journalists has lost his bully pulpit and will no longer be able to peddle his far-left agenda to his millions of nightly viewers. They agree with Walter Cronkite, who now says that Rather should have stepped down years ago.
Story Continues Below
U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney a Republican from Florida says he will host a fund-raising event in Washington, D.C., called "C'est La Vie, Comrade Rather," during which attendees will be able to watch Rather's final newscast at 6:30 p.m.
"Response has been overwhelming," said Feeney. "A lot of us conservatives believe that we'll be celebrating the end of the liberal lock on the airwaves."
According to his fellow liberal journalists, Rather is a great reporter, but as Mike Walker showed in his new book "Rather Dumb" his journalism has been at best sloppy, and the real the reporting was actually done by a large staff of producers and his off-the-air reportorial staff. For the most part, Rather merely fronted the results of other people's work.
Noting Rather's statement to ABC, aired this morning, that, "I made a mistake. I didn't dig hard enough, long enough, didn't ask enough of the right questions I want to get onto the next thing, flat out, " New York's Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin wrote that Rather's bravado was "more fitting for a fading actor addicted to applause. He's a performer, a stunt man, a celebrity who makes $7 million a year for role playing."
And play he did, although to a dwindling audience that's now the smallest of the three major news networks.
Out on a Sour Note; One of Many
Unable to defend Rather's use of forged documents in an attempt to smear President Bush, Rather's supporters claim that his career cannot be judged by one episode of blatant political bias.
In response to this canard, the Media Research Council (MRC) says that "last September's politically motivated fraud wasn't a departure for Rather; it was just an extreme example of the obnoxious bias that's tarnished his whole career."
In a March 3, 2005 statement MRC's Brent Bozell laid it on the line:
"Dan Rather spent his career at CBS spinning the news to further a partisan political agenda. He fawned over Hillary Clinton (‘political lightning'), praised the impeached Bill Clinton (an ‘honest man'), attempted to ambush the first President George Bush over Iran-contra (‘you've made us hypocrites in the face of the world'), and demonized the Gingrich Revolution (as an attempt to ‘demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor').
"Dan Rather's legacy will be defined by his fall from grace during last year's presidential campaign . . . He leaves behind a news organization that is a mere shadow of its former self."
On their website, MRC lists pages of examples of Rather's undisguised leftist bias including one incident in 1987, when on the June 17 CBS Evening News Rather kowtowed to his cadre of liberal friends who could never find anything evil about the evil empire when he said "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy."
Not long after, the Soviet empire came crashing down when the Russian people belied Rather's proclamation by opting for democracy. Over the years, Rather has sought to brainwash the shrinking pool of Americans who still watched his show into believing that conservatives are hateful, far-right radicals, while the Clintons were wonderful, for example.
Notes MRC, which has kept a sharp eye and ear open for Rather's frequent excursions into liberal propaganda disguised as reporting:
Rather declared early in 1995: "The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor."
Six years later, he attacked President Bush's "big tax cut plan, partly bankrolled, critics say, through cuts in many federal aid programs for children and education," despite the truth that there no "cuts" (in 2004, the Cato Institute calculated the Department of Education's budget had soared 75 percent during Bush's first three years, from $36 billion to $63 billion).
When CBS paired Rather with Connie Chung in 1993, he sought inspiration from Bill CLinton. "If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we'd take it right now and walk away winners."
When Hillary decided she wanted to win a New York Senate seat, Rather enthused: "Once a political lightning rod, today she is political lightning. A crowd pleaser and first-class fundraiser, a person under enormous pressure to step into the arena, this time on her own."
Carrying water for John Kerry during his campaign for the presidency, Rather sought to smear Bush's economic record when reporting on the brutal murder of four civilians in Iraq last March. He asked: "What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy, it may be, for some, the only job they can find."
It was a different story when Kerry was on the receiving end. Then Rather played defense. MRC writes, "In a July interview, he presented the Democratic nominee as a hero victimized by a nasty GOP: "Have you ever had any anger about President Bush — who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard — running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam?"
But the MRC is not the only group to target Rather's reporting. The liberal Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) took a different view. On their website they maintain that although in their view Rather is not biased, he is instead just a lousy reporter.
Says FAIR: "It's a good bet that Rather's retirement will draw significant attention to the so-called 'Rathergate' controversy. But instead of revealing partisanship in Rather's work, the episode falls into a pattern of sloppiness on Rather's part in his eagerness for certain stories."
FAIR doesn't take their reasoning the required step further, considering that Rather's "eagerness" must, on some level, have its roots in his beliefs. FAIR will only go so far as to say "Right-wing media critics and pundits have been effective in tagging Rather with the 'liberal' label. But the context of Rather's entire career points to a different conclusion.
"More often than not, Rather's reporting followed the pattern that Rather himself criticized" in a 1991 interview published by the Boston Herald:
"We're gutless. We're spineless. There's no joy in saying this, but beginning sometime in the 1980s, the American press by and large somehow began to operate on the theory that the first order of business was to be popular with the person, or organization, or institution that you cover."
Not Biased? Dan Rather, In His Own Words
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 10, 2005
America's media elite is awash in a flood of tears over Dan Rather's departure tonight as anchor of the CBS Evening News, which they would like to convince the nation is a tragedy of Homeric proportions.
For Red State America, however, it's a night to rejoice – one of the nation's most demonstrably biased broadcast journalists has lost his bully pulpit and will no longer be able to peddle his far-left agenda to his millions of nightly viewers. They agree with Walter Cronkite, who now says that Rather should have stepped down years ago.
Story Continues Below
U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney a Republican from Florida says he will host a fund-raising event in Washington, D.C., called "C'est La Vie, Comrade Rather," during which attendees will be able to watch Rather's final newscast at 6:30 p.m.
"Response has been overwhelming," said Feeney. "A lot of us conservatives believe that we'll be celebrating the end of the liberal lock on the airwaves."
According to his fellow liberal journalists, Rather is a great reporter, but as Mike Walker showed in his new book "Rather Dumb" his journalism has been at best sloppy, and the real the reporting was actually done by a large staff of producers and his off-the-air reportorial staff. For the most part, Rather merely fronted the results of other people's work.
Noting Rather's statement to ABC, aired this morning, that, "I made a mistake. I didn't dig hard enough, long enough, didn't ask enough of the right questions I want to get onto the next thing, flat out, " New York's Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin wrote that Rather's bravado was "more fitting for a fading actor addicted to applause. He's a performer, a stunt man, a celebrity who makes $7 million a year for role playing."
And play he did, although to a dwindling audience that's now the smallest of the three major news networks.
Out on a Sour Note; One of Many
Unable to defend Rather's use of forged documents in an attempt to smear President Bush, Rather's supporters claim that his career cannot be judged by one episode of blatant political bias.
In response to this canard, the Media Research Council (MRC) says that "last September's politically motivated fraud wasn't a departure for Rather; it was just an extreme example of the obnoxious bias that's tarnished his whole career."
In a March 3, 2005 statement MRC's Brent Bozell laid it on the line:
"Dan Rather spent his career at CBS spinning the news to further a partisan political agenda. He fawned over Hillary Clinton (‘political lightning'), praised the impeached Bill Clinton (an ‘honest man'), attempted to ambush the first President George Bush over Iran-contra (‘you've made us hypocrites in the face of the world'), and demonized the Gingrich Revolution (as an attempt to ‘demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor').
"Dan Rather's legacy will be defined by his fall from grace during last year's presidential campaign . . . He leaves behind a news organization that is a mere shadow of its former self."
On their website, MRC lists pages of examples of Rather's undisguised leftist bias including one incident in 1987, when on the June 17 CBS Evening News Rather kowtowed to his cadre of liberal friends who could never find anything evil about the evil empire when he said "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy."
Not long after, the Soviet empire came crashing down when the Russian people belied Rather's proclamation by opting for democracy. Over the years, Rather has sought to brainwash the shrinking pool of Americans who still watched his show into believing that conservatives are hateful, far-right radicals, while the Clintons were wonderful, for example.
Notes MRC, which has kept a sharp eye and ear open for Rather's frequent excursions into liberal propaganda disguised as reporting:
Rather declared early in 1995: "The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor."
Six years later, he attacked President Bush's "big tax cut plan, partly bankrolled, critics say, through cuts in many federal aid programs for children and education," despite the truth that there no "cuts" (in 2004, the Cato Institute calculated the Department of Education's budget had soared 75 percent during Bush's first three years, from $36 billion to $63 billion).
When CBS paired Rather with Connie Chung in 1993, he sought inspiration from Bill CLinton. "If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we'd take it right now and walk away winners."
When Hillary decided she wanted to win a New York Senate seat, Rather enthused: "Once a political lightning rod, today she is political lightning. A crowd pleaser and first-class fundraiser, a person under enormous pressure to step into the arena, this time on her own."
Carrying water for John Kerry during his campaign for the presidency, Rather sought to smear Bush's economic record when reporting on the brutal murder of four civilians in Iraq last March. He asked: "What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy, it may be, for some, the only job they can find."
It was a different story when Kerry was on the receiving end. Then Rather played defense. MRC writes, "In a July interview, he presented the Democratic nominee as a hero victimized by a nasty GOP: "Have you ever had any anger about President Bush — who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard — running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam?"
But the MRC is not the only group to target Rather's reporting. The liberal Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) took a different view. On their website they maintain that although in their view Rather is not biased, he is instead just a lousy reporter.
Says FAIR: "It's a good bet that Rather's retirement will draw significant attention to the so-called 'Rathergate' controversy. But instead of revealing partisanship in Rather's work, the episode falls into a pattern of sloppiness on Rather's part in his eagerness for certain stories."
FAIR doesn't take their reasoning the required step further, considering that Rather's "eagerness" must, on some level, have its roots in his beliefs. FAIR will only go so far as to say "Right-wing media critics and pundits have been effective in tagging Rather with the 'liberal' label. But the context of Rather's entire career points to a different conclusion.
"More often than not, Rather's reporting followed the pattern that Rather himself criticized" in a 1991 interview published by the Boston Herald:
"We're gutless. We're spineless. There's no joy in saying this, but beginning sometime in the 1980s, the American press by and large somehow began to operate on the theory that the first order of business was to be popular with the person, or organization, or institution that you cover."
