CBS' SAFER DUMPS ON RATHER

DAN Rather made some surprising enemies during his many years as an award-winning reporter and anchorman for CBS News - one of them being his "60 Minutes" colleague Morley Safer, who Rather once suggested should have been shot dead. In "Lone Star," an unauthorized bio of Rather out this September, Alan Weisman writes that Safer "has not been a friend of Rather's for years, since their days in Vietnam." The final straw came when Rather took over for Safer not long after Safer's jolting report about the burning of a Vietnam village by a platoon of U.S. Marines.

"When Rather replaced me . . . he went to a group of Marines and said, 'If I were you guys, I would have shot him.' Or words to that effect," Safer tells Weisman. "And that my report should never have gone on the air." Asked whether Rather had ripped his fellow newsman to cozy up with the troops, Safer bristles, "Who the hell knows why? Have I ever confronted him about it? No. Now we just have a polite relationship."

Rather is also raked over the coals by co-workers for the dubious handling of his report on President George W. Bush's alleged lousy Air National Guard service record. Rather continued to defend the story even after it was found to be based on forged documents. "It's the same thing he did over and over again. You know, 'Don't tell me I'm wrong,' " former CBS News president Ed Joyce told Weisman, who himself was a CBS newswriter and producer.

"In my opinion he was guilty of journalistic malpractice," Joyce says. "To go out on a limb with that sort of thin sourcing and then, when you get caught, go on the 'CBS Evening News' defending it in such an arrogant

Perhaps Vietnam veterans ought to take a page out of the book of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and air television ads exposing Rather's deceits — something along the lines of: "Dan Rather lied about his Vietnam documentary. I know. I was there. I saw what happened. When the chips were down, you could not count on Dan Rather."

Aw, we could manage something a little better than that:

In 1963 Dan Rather was a 32 year-old CBS news reporter covering the Kennedy visit to Dallas on November 22. At the time, Rather was widely praised for his coverage of the assassination. However, over the years, as elements of the truth have been discovered, Rather's reporting has been revealed to be less than truthful. Consider this: Rather was the only newsman present at a private screening of the Zapruder film the day after the assassination. He described what was in the film over nationwide radio and was accurate until he described the fatal headshot. Rather stated Kennedy's head "went forward with considerable violence," exactly opposite of what is in the film. Several months later, Rather was promoted to White House correspondent and by the 1980s, he served as the chief news anchorman of CBS. With the film withheld from public viewing by Time-Life until 1975, Rather's bogus account of the fatal headshot was taken as the gospel truth.

Another questionable statement by Rather involves his location at the time of the assassination. In his book, The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist (ISBN: 0345353633), Rather writes that he was waiting to pick up news film from CBS cameramen in the Presidential motorcade on the west side of the Triple Underpass. He claimed to have missed witnessing the assassination by only a few yards. However, recently discovered film footage of the west side of the underpass has now become public. This film along with still photographs show the Kennedy limousine speeding through the underpass and on to Stemmons Freeway with Rather nowhere in sight.

Why did Rather lie about the fatal headshot and his whereabouts at the time of the assassination?

Yep but this is a much much better proof of what a lying scumbag Dan Rather truly is. Claiming kids in Dallas were cheering at the news of the JFK Assassination. Also charts his hatred of Conservatives way way from the beginning!

Weekly Standard Article

Eddie Barker, for one, remembers. The news director for CBS's radio and TV affiliates in Dallas at the time of President Kennedy's November 22, 1963, assassination, Barker is widely credited with first reporting on the air that the president was dead, having received word through a doctor acquaintance directly from the hospital ER. Rather, then based in Dallas as a reporter for CBS's national news broadcast and working out of Barker's newsroom, later took credit for the scoop, Barker says. The error is repeated in historical accounts often enough to annoy the now-retired Barker, though he says the falsehood was later acknowledged by Rather.

It was a different lie--one delivered on national news, and at the expense of children--that caused Rather trouble at the time. As reporters from around the world descended on the Texas city, Rather went on the air with a local Methodist minister who made a stunning claim: Children at Dallas's University Park Elementary School had cheered when told of the president's death.

The tale was perfect for the moment, reinforcing the notion among distant media elites that Dallas was a reactionary "City of Hate." It slyly played to a local audience, too: The school named was in upper-income University Park, one of two adjacent municipal enclaves that shared a school district and a reputation for fiercely protected, lily-white privilege. Finally, for the ambitious Rather--a native Texan and then a Dallas resident--the account represented the very sort of revealing, local dirt that the throngs of out-of-town competitors would have to work far harder to get.

Except that it wasn't true, and Rather knew it, Barker says.

Approached earlier by the same minister with what was a second-hand account, Barker himself had run the story by the school's principal and some teachers, all of whom denied it outright. Because of the shooting, which took place at 12:30 p.m., the principal had decided to close the school early, though without telling the students why. The children at the school--including three of Barker's own--were merely happy to be going home early, he was told. There couldn't have been any spontaneous cheering at the news of Kennedy's murder, because no such news had been announced.

Undaunted, the dogged minister--"a very, very strong liberal and a very, very strong Kennedy supporter," Barker says--moved on to Rather.

"Rather came to me, and I said, 'My kids are in school there, and I checked it out, and there's not a darn thing to it,'" says Barker. "He said, 'Well, great--I'll just forget it.' But instead of forgetting it, he went out and did this gut job on Dallas and its conservatism," with the preacher's story at the center of his report.

With the discredited account likely to be challenged by the local affiliate's editors before being fed to New York, Rather sidestepped a customary film-editing session with Barker and arranged to file the report live instead, Barker says. "And so here's Dan with the preacher, telling this story about kids at UP cheering when told the president was dead."

Livid at being lied to, Barker laid into Rather as soon as he returned to the newsroom, expelling the reporter and all his national-news colleagues from the building on the spot. "I said 'Get the hell out of here--you and this whole damn bunch!'" he says.

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