The Richmond Times-Dispatch: The CBS Bogus-Memo Affair

(Hat Tip: RatherBiased.com)

Ross Mackenzie has a piece yesterday (January 27) that concurs with my analysis of the Thornburgh-Boccardi Report. Mackenzie picks up on the same things that I spotted earlier: that even if you don't grant that Dan Rather and his team were deliberately managing the news, you have to find that they were careless, overzealous by several orders of magnitude, used the worst possible sources, and in general crossed a lot of lines that you do not cross if you want people to take you seriously as a journalist. And those are just the things that Thornburgh and Boccardi specifically laid to CBS' charge.

But Mackenzie then rounds on Thornburgh and Boccardi, and very specifically, too, for letting Dan Rather and his team off far too easily. Dan Rather comes in for the worst criticism, as is only fair. Specifically, he has always cultivated the image of a reporter, not a mere news reader. So which is he? He can't have it both ways.

To put that into perspective, I lived and worked in Houston, Texas for six of the eight Reagan years. I talked to those who remembered Dan Rather from his days at KHOU-TV, the CBS affiliate, and the day he reported on Hurricane Carla and made a point of having himself filmed clinging to a tree for dear life. That, in fact, is how he got noticed and "went national," as Houston's residents at the time still remembered. This is the man who told Thornburgh and Boccardi that he was "distracted" by the unusually heavy hurricane season of 2004? I'd have thought that hurricanes would be old hat to him--been there, done that, got the shards of bark clinging to his shirt to prove it.

Nor does Mackenzie limit himself to the Killian Memoranda. He quotes a CBS staffer as saying that Dan Rather would have been all over John Kerry's war record, had anything comparable to the Killian Memoranda surfaced about him. And then Mackenzie asks, quite reasonably: Oh, yeah??? But I need not comment on that one--not after John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi did such a four-oh job (and after all, they were there; I wasn't).

So where is Mackenzie's analysis incomplete? Maybe in just this wise: that Dan Rather is not the only one, and neither is CBS.