Dan Rather's New Courage: A Hefty Lawsuit Against CBS
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Gee, just when I was all excited about Wednesday's big premiere of the new CBS cultural triumph Kid Nation, my old friend Dan Rather went and blew my whole evening out of the water by filing a massive lawsuit against the company.
Here we go again.
It has been three years since we aired our much-maligned story on President Bush's National Guard service and reaped a whirlwind of right-wing outrage and talk radio retaliation. That part of the assault on our story was not unexpected. In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.
What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.
To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War -- and then covered it up -- was no big deal. Our having the temerity to say it on national TV was unforgivable and we had to be destroyed. They organized, with the help of longtime well-connected Republican activists, and began their assault.
Actually, we had done a straightforward, well-substantiated story. We presented former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes in his first ever interview saying that he had pulled strings to get the future president into the National Guard after a Bush family friend requested help in keeping the kid out of Vietnam.
And we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush's former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president's official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks.
We reported that since these documents were copies, not originals, they could not be fully authenticated, at least not in the legal sense. They could not be subjected to tests to determine the age of the paper or the ink. We did get corroboration on the content and support from a couple of longtime document analysts saying they saw nothing indicating that the memos were not real.
Instantly, the far right blogosphere bully boys pronounced themselves experts on document analysis, and began attacking the form and font in the memos. They screamed objections that ultimately proved to have no basis in fact. But they captured the argument. They dominated the discussion by churning out gigabytes of mind-numbing internet dissertations about the typeface in the memos, focusing on the curl at the end of the "a," the dip on the top of the "t," the spacing, the superscript, which typewriters were used in the military in 1972.
It was a deceptive approach, and it worked.
These critics blathered on about everything but the content. They knew they would lose that argument, so they didn't raise it. They focused on the most obscure, most difficult to decipher element of the story and dove in, attacking CBS, Dan Rather, me, the story and the horse we rode in on -- without respite, relentlessly, for days.
Soon, traditional media began repeating some of the claims and joining in the attack on the story. They didn't do any real work on the substance of the story; they just wanted to talk about typeface. And that was an empty, unsolvable argument that did nothing but serve the purposes of the Bush administration, which had been fanning the flames of the controversy and hoping to avoid any hard questions.
The fracas scared the bejeezus out of the CBS corporate types who were completely unaccustomed to the rough and tumble interaction of the blog world. Frankly, the foaming-at-the-mouth response scared me, too. These people WERE scary. Who wants to see her picture online accompanied by digital catcalls demanding that she be "taken out"? And that was one of the milder posts.
But the truly chilling part of this entire saga is what happened next. Though our story had raised entirely appropriate questions about the president's military record, though there had been substantiation for everything we reported, though this was an issue certainly worth discussing in wartime, all that was lost in the melee that followed.
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Mary Mapes worked in television news for 25 years, the last 16 years at CBS News, where she received numerous awards, including the coveted Peabody.
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