I just figured out where Dan Rather went wrong.

[Plaid Adder]

I was going back over my old columns and I re-read the beginning of "Unexcused Absence," which talks about the Memogate thing. That column was written before all the revelations about the mysterious provenance of the Infamous Memos, so I have a footnote in there now (for the book version) about what happened afterwards. I was looking at this thinking how unfair it all is--Dan Rather and his team get raked over the coals for this one small thing, while the whole media system that trumpeted the Swift Boat smear gets off scott free. "Dammit," I snarled to myself, "Just about all of *Unfit for Command* was a forged document!"

And then I realized. Dan Rather's problem is that he's an old-fashioned journalist, from the time when you actually had to be able to cite some evidence to back up your claims. That's why they were excited to have the memos; because they didn't think it would be good enough to just get out there and say, "Some people say that GWB went AWOL."

The newfangled 'journalists' don't *have* to mess around with documentary evidence. They don't need it. All they have to do is repeat what someone else is saying and then say, "Is it true? Or isn't it? Here to argue about whether it's true or it isn't are two people who are not journalists. Person #1, there are some people who say that there isn't a shred of documentary evidence to support any of your claims. Does this mean they're not true?" And then of course Person #1 says, "Of course not! All of these claims are true! You can tell because I'm repeating them loudly and with much spattering of saliva."

You couldn't do a sting like Memogate on Brit Hume. He's never going to get caught using a forged document because he feels no need to have any kind of truck with documentary evidence of any sort. He knows what he's got to say, and he knows nobody in either his organization or his audience is going to ask for proof.


No good deed goes unpunished,

The Plaid Adder

[qanda]

1. That is so true

I never thought of it like that before, but it is spot on.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. I think Jon Stewart made that exact point on his show the other night!

All you have to say is "Is it true that so and so did such and such? "
That way no one can say that you made the claim. That is exactly how all those RightWing nuts get away with the crap they do. They just lay down innuendos, and ask questions that imply things..but never come right out and say things..so that they can have "plausible deniability".

[Mist]

3. Thanks for pointing that out

I think you're right. Plus, without journalistic standards, news outlets save so much money that used to go to anonymous researchers! A truly Rethug way of running a news business.

[hfojvt]

4. Proof? Proof? We don't need no stinking proof?

He said it, I believe it, that settles it.

[Liberty Belle]

5. CBS' "independent panel" was anything but.

The panel that looked into the Rather memogate issue had just two members: a former Reagan cabinet official and an AP executive with ties to the Iran-Contra Scandal. Read Greg Palast's article at www.gregpalast.com.

[Skittles]

6. hey Plaid Adder, wingnuts will really miss old Dan Rather

ask ANY CONSERVATIVE to give you NAMES of the "LIBERAL MEDIA" and they ALWAYS come up with the same three tired names - RATHER BROWKAW JENNINGS. What on EARTH will they say now? :D

[WillowTree]

7. Oh Please!!

There was so much wrong with that whole thing that it's only Dan Rather's stature and reputation in the broadcast news industry that saved him from suffering the same fate as Mary Mapes, who got exactly what she deserved. Let's take things one-by-one, shall we?

#1 Whoever it was whose job it was to vet all aspects of that segment, most particularly the memos, just plain didn't do his/her job. Presumably that was Mapes and the story, which is most likely true, is that guys so far up the news Food Chain leave all of the details to the producer/staff and pretty much just read their lines when the time comes. Could be, but this is a classic example of why it's so inadvisable for those who have a reputation to protect and so much to lose to be that far out of the loop and, hopefully, going forward these folks will take more than a passing interest in the stories that they present. But the thing is, Dan Rather gets the Big Bucks to be the guy in front of the camera presenting the story as factual and, in the minds of the general public, he's the one who's responsible for its veracity. As such, he can't legitimately try to pass the proverbial buck, especially since it's common knowledge that there's no love lost between him and the Bush family in the first place.

#2 It's no secret that Bill Burkett, who may or may not be just a wee bit touched depending on who you talk to, has a big fat ax to grind with W. He could be as sane and sober as the day is long, and his beef with Bush could be 100% legitimate, but he's been making noise about that for years now and, if Mary Mapes didn't check out her source enough to find out about it, she has no business being in a news operation at all. And if she did find out about it and still didn't check those documents within an inch of her life, she's a damned fool..........period.

#3 Regardless of all that, Burkett's story about how he came to have the memos is..........how to put this diplomatically?..........sketchy..........at best. I mean, come ON! We've got a guy who's been very vocal for years about how he believes that he's been seriously wronged by W, who shows up with papers and a story about how he got the memos from someone named Lucy Ramirez, who he knows nothing about, had never met before, hasn't seen since and doesn't know how to contact, and he doesn't know how this Lucy person is supposed to have come into possession of the memos in the first place. Oh, and she didn't give them to him herself, but rather they were surreptitiously passed to him at a livestock show by a man whose name he doesn't even know and who immediately disappeared into the crowd, never to be seen again. It's like something out of a hokey old spy movie when ya think about it! And Mary Mapes just accepts this? This whole cloak and dagger saga doesn't give her even a moment's pause? I mean, considering this story, one would think that she would never have used those documents unless she had at least three well-known and highly renowned experts who were willing to go on camera themselves to vouch for their authenticity and, preferably, a half dozen people who personally saw Killian type them, to boot. Which brings us to..........


#4 Even with their backs to the wall and their credibility, not to mention their jobs, on the line, and after weeks of swearing up and down that they knew for sure that they were the real deal, they can't come up with even one documents expert who will authenticate the memos one way or the other. If only they'd tried just a little bit harder to be sure of what they had on the front end..........Sigh.

#5 Under the circumstances, I would have thought that they could have found at least one other person for their storoy to back-up the info in the memos who wasn't clearly biased. I mean, Ben Barnes was an unabashed Kerry supporter (not that there's any reason that he should have been abashed about being a Kerry supporter..........I'm just saying) and has a couple of semi-sleazy things in his own past and the secretary, who seemed like a sweet old lady, used the 'selected' line during her interview. Nothing wrong with that, either, except that it doesn't exactly give her the aura of impartiality, y'know?

#6 Let's just let the part about Mary Mapes contacting Joe Lockhart on Burkett's behalf rest with the fact that it was a patently stupid move on her part, considering. What was she thinking? WAS she thinking? Can't hardly blame Lockhart. All he did was answer the phone. But her making that call for Burkett does give credence to the perception that she was way too anxious to get this piece on the air no matter what.

Look, everyone here knows that the truth of the story itself doesn't rest entirely on the memos, but all of those people have been in the business long enough to know that if they weren't legit, that fact could have tainted the rest of the story even if everything else they had was otherwise rock-solid, which this one wasn't. Anyone with half a brain would never in a zillion years have used them without knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were absolutely real. And they didn't even try that hard, all things considered. And, as I said, it was Dan Rather who went to air with it so which stamps it with his imprimatur and he would have shared in the credit if all had gone as planned with the story so, in the end, he has to share the blame. His subsequent stubborn refusal for days and days to even entertain the possibility that the memos weren't real or that any further investigation would be undertaken to put the controversy to rest didn't help the public perception, either.

So, in the end, Rather's reputation, at the end of a long and distinguished career is tarnished in the minds of many, four other people are out of their jobs, the story didn't hurt Bush one bit and it actually did hurt Kerry to one degree or another thanks to the Lockhart connection. The Keystone Kops couldn't have effed this up much worse.

[ComerPerro]

8. You are very right

And, putting it in terms of the Swiftboat Vets was a very good way of looking at it.