Free Republic

Dan Rather, who famously lost his job after he was caught spreading a made-up story about former President George W. Bush, is making the rounds again to discuss accuracy in media and the proper role of the press in our republic. Because this is real life and the producers of NBC's "Today" show lack any sense of self-awareness. "[A] recent poll that said nearly half of people think the media make up stories!" co-host Savannah Guthrie said as she kicked off the morning segment. Referring to a Politico survey released in October, she then turned to Rather and said,...

In a staggering example of the press lacking any self-awareness, on Monday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie fretted over “a recent poll that said nearly half of people think the media make up stories” and unbelievably turned to disgraced former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather to suggest ways in which the news media could “enhance its own credibility.”Citing a Politico poll from October that found 46 percent of voters “believe the news media fabricate news stories about President Donald Trump and his administration,” Guthrie asked Rather: “The media itself is under fire. And what do you think the media...

Ever since his forced resignation in disgrace, Dan Rather has continued on a downward spiral. His career, such as it is, has been kept alive by appearances on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, where he takes potshots at his former employer and President Donald Trump. It is a sad spectacle.Rather has now suffered another major embarrassment. The former anchorman of the CBS Evening News has been accused by a website devoted to exposing military corruption of falsely claiming to have been a member of the U.S. Marine Corps.The editor-in-chief of the website www.MilitaryCorruption.com, retired U.S. Army Major Glenn MacDonald,...

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather is teaching an online course in journalism called “finding the truth in the news” at UDemy. Now, he’s taken to Facebook to say that the media, the American people, and the political class has to call out President Trump on his lies. No, this isn’t the Onion.“These are not normal times. These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” wrote Rather. “What can we do? We can all step up and say simply and without equivocation. "A lie, is a lie, is a lie!" And if someone won't say it, those...

In October 2015, Robert Redford played Dan Rather in the cinematic retelling of those phony 2004 memos about George W. Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War. The movie was titled, paradoxically enough, Truth. Here’s now interested the public was in Rather’s Truth:

Raising eyebrows among some critics, former CBS anchor Dan Rather is now teaching an online course focused on ethics in journalism. Called “Journalism & Finding the Truth in the News” and offered through Udemy, the class is aimed at both media career aspirants and the general public.

The Romanian hacker whose illegal exploits first exposed Hillary Clinton’s use of a non-governmental e-mail system is set to waive extradition later this month so he can face trial in the United States on a nine-count felony indictment. Known as “Guccifer,” hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, 43, is scheduled for a February 17 extradition hearing in Romania, where he has been jailed since his arrest in January 2014. Lazar is serving a four-year sentence for hacking into the e-mail accounts of several public figures in Romania, including the head of the country’s intelligence service. In a phone interview from a Bucharest...

From the moment 17-year-old Donald Trump was named a captain for his senior year at New York Military Academy, he ordered the officers under his command to keep strict discipline. Shoes had to be shined. Beds had to be made. Underclassmen had to spring to attention. Then, a month into Trump’s tenure in the fall of 1963, came an abrupt change. The tall, confident senior with a shock of blond hair was removed from that coveted post atop A Company and transferred to a new job on the school staff — another prestigious assignment, but one with no command responsibilities....

We live in a weary age of fable. The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled "Truth." But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning. In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his "60 Minutes" team -- just weeks before the 2004 election -- had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot. The fabulist movie comes on...

CBS has refused to run advertising for Truth, the film starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford that revisits a painful episode in the network's past involving a discredited 2004 news story on former President George W. Bush's military service record. CBS has denounced the movie, which opens Friday, as a disservice to the public and journalists. Redford plays Dan Rather in Truth, with Blanchett as producer Mary Mapes. Together, they were behind a 60 Minutes II story that questioned Bush's Vietnam War-era commitment to service in the Texas Air National Guard. But CBS apologized for the story after documents used...

The episode known as Rathergate represents one of the great journalistic frauds of our time. The scandal erupted from a 60 Minutes Wednesday segment rushed to air on the evening of September 8, 2004, in time to influence the approaching presidential election pitting George W. Bush against John Kerry, as it was clearly intended to do. The segment consisted of two parts that didn’t quite fit together except in their antipathy to Bush. In the first part, based on an interview with the vice chairman of Kerry’s national finance committee, Dan Rather essentially claimed that political influence had been brought...

The film “Truth” will be released commercially later this month to retell the Rathergate scandal from the perspective of Mary Mapes. The film is based on Mapes’s almost laughable 2005 Rathergate memoir. The left routinely seeks to rewrite even yesterday’s news; events eleven years ago, when Mapes committed her misconduct, have now attained the status of ancient history. John and I therefore sought to reiterate the basic facts of the Rathergate scandal in the Weekly Standard article “Rather shameful.” Our article is intended to constitute Rathergate 101. Now comes Atlanta attorney Harry MacDougald — the pseudonymous “Buckhead” — to give...

When CBS’s 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast its lead story—reported by Dan Rather and produced by Mary Mapes—on the evening of September 8, 2004, it was given the anodyne title “For the Record,” as though it constituted little more than a disinterested historical footnote. In reality, the story was a bold fabrication about President George W. Bush’s long-ago service in the Texas National Guard, intended to damage him in his campaign for reelection against John Kerry. Within hours of the broadcast, after CBS News posted online PDF copies of four memos highlighted in the segment, the story began to fall apart...

Just how bad is the movie 'Truth' that will be released tomorrow? So bad that even the notoriously liberal Vox is mocking it. Vox writer Todd VanDerWerff goes so far as to describe it as an example of why "so many people hate Hollywood liberals." As we shall see even Dan Rather in 2004 disagreed with the premise of "Truth."

Did anyone just hear Rush give credit to Free Republic? First he named the Freeper Buckhead then second time he said Burkehead. Pretty cool.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but I asked Rush to give Freeper Buckhead credit and he just did! (Called him Burkhead! Oh well!)

Rush just acknowledged and credited FReeper Buckhead with exposing Dan Rather's and Mary Mape's forgery!! Kudos!

Matt Lauer pushes a rewrite of history with the movie "Truth".  On the Today Show, at about 08:44 central time, Lauer gave discredited Dan Rather the opportunity to rewrite history.   Lauer shamelessly promots the movie based on the book written by Mary Mapes, who uncritically accepted the fraud that advanced the narrative she was promoting. Rather made the outrageous claim that the story that he promoted to stop President George Bush's re-election bid was "true".   It echoes his response at the time that the fraudulent documents that he used in his attempt to discredit President "Dubya" Bush were...

Truth Isn't True Selling a big lie. October 14, 2015 Bruce Bawer 6 625 The movie Truth isn't yet officially out, but it's been the subject of enough early reviews to establish that it strongly communicates one great and important truth: that if you want to sell a Big Lie that's been definitely and very publicly exposed as a lie, just wait a decade or so and then make an all-star Hollywood movie presenting that lie as the unvarnished truth. Promote the hell out of it. Then sit back and watch history get rewritten in the mind of a whole...

There are many things that real people do to become the subject of sympathetic movies. Make a flawless emergency landing in the Hudson River with a disabled jet full of passengers. Survive a devastating storm atop Mt. Everest. Become the most lethal sniper in the history of the US military. Before the advent of the movie “Truth,” no one would have thought broadcasting a shoddy and immediately discredited report that ruined the careers of the journalists involved and gave their storied network a black eye would make the list. In a better world, the bloggers who exposed the malfeasance of...