The night before the story was tentatively scheduled to air, Rather was sitting at the anchor desk, with less than half an hour before the start of the Evening News. He called Josh Howard, who had recently been named as executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday, and asked what they were doing to promote his story.
“We’re not,” Howard said. “We haven’t gotten the lawyers to sign off. The script isn’t finished. We haven’t even talked to the White House. I’m not going to start promoting a story when we don’t know what we have.” That was not the answer Rather wanted to hear.
“Other people are chasing this story,” he said. “We’re going to lose our exclusive. We have to get our hooks into the story.”
When Howard again refused, Rather raised the stakes.
“You can’t do that either,” Howard said. “We haven’t finished vetting this.” Rather grumbled and hung up. To raise the specter of giving away a scoop to a competing news outlet was practically unheard of.
Howard, who had once been an Evening News producer, had never been subjected to this kind of pressure. He did, however, have a backup plan. They were still in rerun season, so if the Guard story failed to get the green light, he had a previously aired program ready to go.
That's a really telling piece of work there. Dan Rather, one of America's most trusted news anchors, appears to be so willing to try to discredit the President's military service, that he pushed to run the story even though it wasn't quite verified yet.
He even threatens to go somewhere else if CBS won't air the story.
Then it was found out that the documents were poor forgeries and Dan Rather even is trying to sue CBS for his firing.
Well if these accusations are true, the only person who's really at fault here is Dan Rather. His rabid hatred made him blind to the most basic of journalistic rules: Report the truth. Even to this day, Dan has claimed that even though the documents were a forgery, the story is still true. I don't know what kind of messed up logic that is, but whatever Dan's been smoking, please pass it around as it takes away all the evidence of reality.
For example: If I published something that wasn't true, I'd lose readers. I have a certain responsibility towards my readers to tell the truth as far as I know it as of the time it's posted. If my post turns out to be false, I apologize and publish a rebuttal.
However, since I usually get my information from multiple sources, it rarely happens. I like it that way. It builds trust that my readers hold in me. Trust is something that's not easily re-buildable if it's broken, so I make every effort to be as truthful in my reporting as possible.
Dan forgot that cardinal rule and he paid for it with his job. Sometimes people whom you loathe are right and you are wrong. When that happens and you let it effect your job, don't be surprised when you lose that job because it highly depends on the public's trust.
Travis
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