According to this Washington Post article, CBS is beating Dan Rather like a rented mule.

CBS executives have decided there is no future role at the network for Dan Rather, making it certain that the man who sat in the anchor chair for 24 years will depart by this fall.

These executives recognize Rather’s contributions over four decades and are not trying to boot him because of the controversy surrounding his botched story on President Bush and the National Guard, say network sources who declined to be named while discussing a sensitive personnel matter. But the executives concluded there was no room for Rather at “60 Minutes,” particularly with incoming anchor Katie Couric planning to report a half-dozen stories a year and the hiring of CNN’s Anderson Cooper as a part-time contributor.

This is absurd. If you look at who contributes to 60 Minutes, the main difference between Couric and Rather would seem to be Dan’s age and experience. But that can’t be the reason Rather’s being dumped because most contributors to 60 Minutes (Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, Andy Rooney, and Mike Wallace) are 65 or older and none of them have been forced out to make room for perky Katie and Anderson. So it’s not age and experience, hmmm.

Could it be that they haven’t screwed up in a big way and left CBS open to unanswerable criticisms of liberal bias? That’s my guess as to why Dan is being so publicly humiliated after 44 years of service:

In place of the swagger that had served him so well throughout his 44-year career at CBS News was an obvious sadness that his tenure at the network was ticking down to an inglorious end. Mr. Rather complained that since stepping down as anchor of the ” CBS Evening News” last year, in the aftermath of a reporting scandal, he had been ill used as a correspondent on “60 Minutes” and had been given virtually nothing at all to do for the previous six weeks.

If you have forgotten the particulars behind Rathergate, drop by LittleGreenFootballs and check out Charles Johnson’s proof that the memo broadcast by 60 Minutes 2 was a forgery.

So that’s what’s really behind Dan Rather’s downfall at CBS, here’s what we’ve learned from his fall from grace:

• Those who report for the major mainstream media news organizations have a liberal bias. I’m sure that Dan’s peers think his error wasn’t in manipulating the news, it was getting caught in the act.

• The content of news from CBS and the rest of the MSM is biased in favor of liberals. Rathergate made it harder for them to keep up the charade of impartiality.

• Most important, no matter how glaring the evidence may be that the MSM is biased, they will never ever admit it because their only remaining claim to legitimacy (bogus though it is) is the gravitas that comes from being “balanced.” If Rather had actually admitted to liberal bias that admission would done far more harm to CBS news.

So when Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were caught in the act trying to swing the 2004 election in John Kerry’s favor by broadcasting a story based on phony documents, they had to claim that the documents were valid, no matter how conclusive the evidence was that they were forgeries. Ordinarily they might have gotten away with the lies, but the blogosphere kept the story alive in spite of the MSM’s attempts to ignore it. (It helped that the evidence was so compelling that nobody with two synapses to rub together could believe they were authentic.)

There’s a saying about infidelity “when caught red-handed, deny, deny, deny.” When the trap you’re in is such that you can’t even tell the truth, denial is the only option left. Mary Mapes’s explanation as to why the 60 Minutes letters weren’t forgeries is a perfect example:

They claimed that CBS used forged documents and they repeated that lie so often that it stuck. The mainstream media picked it up, repeating bloggers’ criticisms without making any serious effort to investigate the story. But then that would have required real legwork, something that very few were willing to do on this subject.

As for document analysis, it is a mind-numbing and arcane discipline, an imperfect undertaking reserved for courtroom use, not for headlines or Internet political battles. Document analysis is certainly not meant to be done at 11 o’clock at night by someone with no training or experience sitting in front of a glowing computer nursing a grudge and spoiling for a fight. But that’s precisely how the right’s attack against Dan Rather and CBS News was launched.

That first anonymous analyst (who turned out to be a Republican activist lawyer) raised questions about the memo using only a single shot of a faxed document digitally transmitted to his computer screen. Those kinds of transmissions radically change the way a document looks. His analysis was worthless.

Neither Mapes or Rather are stupid (just bitterly partisan) and they know they look foolish by maintaining that the docs were legit. But the alternative is to confirm people’s suspicions by admitting they tried using suspect documents to harm President Bush’s chances for reelection, which would have been a calamity for CBS (Americans won’t tolerate a news organization trying to subvert an election). Not to mention what Congress might have done to CBS the next time broadcast licenses were up for renewal (election meddling does not qualify as broadcasting in the public interest).

So there you have it, Dan can’t tell the truth because he’d never work for an MSM news organization again, and being dissed by CBS has got to tarnish his reputation, so another job in the mainstream media is even more unlikely. He might land something with a liberal cable channel like MSNBC, but he’s used to having millions of viewers and everybody with cable watches Fox News, so what’s left?

Well, he could always try blogging. Working with the pajama-clad minions of the blogosphere could be a refreshing change, but after years in the MSM, I doubt he’d enjoy the relentless fact-checking scrutiny. You never know, he might fit right in!

Tags: blog | weblog | politics | journalists | rathergate | liberal bias | liberals | scandals | miserable failure