MORE WINGNUT FODDER….Dan Rather has filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS over their treatment of him following his infamous 60 Minutes segment about George Bush and the National Guard:
The portrait of Mr. Rather that emerges from the 32-page filing bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, seemingly fearless anchor who for two decades shared the stage with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings as the most watched and recognizable journalists in America.
By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast, which was shown on Sept. 8, 2004, on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” and which purported to offer new evidence of preferential treatment given to Mr. Bush when he was a lieutenant in the Air National Guard.
….Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 — written not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist — “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”
Rather is getting some very, very bad advice here. What he should be hoping for is that this entire incident sinks slowly and quietly out of sight. Instead, he’s decided to reignite public interest in it by filing a lawsuit arguing that he was just reading from a script and never did anything wrong. This is not going to do wonders for his reputation.
