Dan Rather, Purveyor of Forgeries to Swing an Election, Tells You How to Avoid Fake News

One of the points from his "primer' is that trusting a news source doesn't mean that you believe they get everything right, but it does mean they admit their mistakes.

Plot twist: Dan Rather has never admitted his clear forgeries were forgeries and in fact continues suggesting that they may or may not be fake, but they are accurate:

He backs down not one inch from the story's two pillars: that former President George W. Bush gained entry to the Texas Air National Guard through his family's political influence to avoid serving in the Vietnam War; and that Bush was unaccounted for for a year of his assigned duty to that Guard unit. And Rather is steadfast in the blame he assigns for the fallout:

"The pressure got on from powerful people, including the White House, and the corporation disowned the story."

That "imperfect process" and its aftermath is the subject of James Vanderbilt's film, "Truth," with Cate Blanchett starring as Mary Mapes (Rather's producer and, as he calls her, his "right hand") and Robert Redford as Rather.

Listing the things he finds right with that horrible propganda film, he says...

He raises an eyebrow: "Betrayal by some of the people you work with."

As is well-documented in the fallout from the "60 Minutes II" broadcast aired by CBS on Sept. 8, 2004, it was the use of documents that had not been well-vetted that led to the questioning of the Bush story's veracity. And while those documents were never proved to be forgeries, they were never proved to be authentic either.

At the time, Rather acknowledged, "if I knew then what I know now -- I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question."

But neither then, nor now, does he question the core point of the story.

"It's not a matter of opinion whether the central facts of the story were true or not; it's true," he says of the 2004 report. "One: That through the influence of his politically powerful father, George W. Bush got into a so-called champagne unit of the Air National Guard as a way of assuring he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. And two: After he got in … he disappeared for more than a year."

So he's not taking a position on whether they were forgeries nor not, while clinging to the narrative the forgeries purported to prove, that Bush was absent from TANG service for a full year.

It's worth reading this old Daily Signal piece about how transparently fake the "memos" where, with language lifted from a
POS (partisan obsessive syndrome) liberals' blog making this claim, a blog which invented an acronym in 2004 which had never been used in the Air Force or any other service, but then which mysteriously appeared in the memos, supposedly from 1973.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:24 PM

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