“Dan Rather Is Still Chasing the News” by the now-occasional New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg was a ridiculously whitewashed profile of the still-working “journalist” Rather, who resigned in disgrace from the anchor slot at CBS Evening News after relying on phony documents to smear then-2004 Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard, in a segment for CBS's 60 Minutes II program.
"Twenty years after he signed off from his anchor desk for the last time and two months shy of his 94th birthday — Mr. Rather was at it again," Steinberg boasted. Adding:
On a recent Wednesday, he was leading a 30-minute video call about the headlines of the day with a former CBS News colleague, Wayne Nelson, and Alice Maggin, a former ABC News producer.
And this was no idle chitchat. It was an editorial planning call for a newsletter that they publish three times a week.
The newsletter is called Steady — a word Mr. Rather said his father used to soothe him whenever he was ill as a child — and it has more than a half million subscribers.
After gushing that “Dan Rather continues to relish chasing the news,” Steinberg for some reason felt the number of words in a particular Steady essay was newsworthy, as if readers should be impressed by its length (Steinberg’s profile of Rather is itself over 1,400 words):
Mr. Rather said he felt a sense of obligation to shine a light on the second Trump administration.
“I remind myself of one of the basics of journalism: that my job is to hold the powerful accountable,” he said.
On Aug. 18, for example, Mr. Rather and his team published a 1,065-word essay with the headline “Democrats Have Finally Found the Fight” and the subhead “It was gifted to them by a rattled Donald Trump.” The essay was on the efforts by Democratic governors to counter President Trump’s charge to Texas to redraw its legislative districts with the goal of picking up five Republican seats in Congress.
The Times reporter gently, indirectly noted Rather wasn’t doing the while journalistic objectivity thing, while ridiculously calling Rather’s decades of output for the CBS Evening News “objective journalism”: "If lines like those are less subtle than the “on the one hand, on the other hand” pillars of objective journalism on which Mr. Rather’s evening news broadcast stood in its day, he said these times demanded a different journalistic voice."
Steinberg ignored Rather’s long history of spewing hostility toward Republicans (and love for Democrats) from his anchor chair. Here were just a couple of the countless examples compiled by the Media Research Center, courtesy of colleague Rich Noyes:
Rather once told CBS Evening News viewers that the Republican agenda was “to demolish or damage government aid programs...[for] children and the poor.” He advanced the desperate notion that the late ’90s impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice was “a kind of effort at a, quote, ‘coup.’”
After several humdrum paragraphs describing how Rather’s team puts its precious newsletter together, Steinberg finally brought up the reason Rather left CBS in disgrace -- three paragraphs of pathetic whitewash:
Mr. Rather left his CBS anchor chair under pressure. In a segment on “60 Minutes II” in 2004, he and colleagues had raised fresh questions about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War.
They did so using memorandums that attracted the ire of Republican bloggers — and that the network, and later a panel of outside investigators it convened, said it could not authenticate.
In a final report in January 2005, the panel cited a breakdown in standards by CBS in rushing the Bush segment onto the air. But it found no evidence of liberal bias — a frequent knock against Mr. Rather by his conservative critics — in the show’s preparation of the segment.
Here’s what actually happened, as Noyes explained after Rather received a journalism award in 2023 [Click "Expand"]:
[Rather] and producer Mary Mapes attempted an election-year hit job on then-President George W. Bush. Just eight weeks before election day, in a September 8, 2004 report on 60 Minutes, Rather claimed “new” evidence showing Bush received “preferential treatment” during his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard.
“Newly discovered documents spark new questions,” Rather hyped that night on his CBS Evening News. “CBS News has exclusive information, including documents, that now sheds new light on the President’s service record.”
The documents in question were supposedly from Bush’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, typed on his office typewriter decades before computers and word processors became common in the workplace. It didn’t take long before observers on the Internet highlighted how the “newly discovered documents” looked more like something whipped up in Microsoft Word using the default Times Roman font than on an early 1970s typewriter.
Rather further disgraced himself by refusing to back down from the obviously phony documents, eventually leading to his “retirement” in March 2005.