It was bound to happen. Dan Rather is suing CBS.
Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.” As plaintiffs, the suit names CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its executive chairman, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.
In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”
It's odd that Rather took so long to file his suit if his cause is so just. Did it take him two years to get mad enough? Maybe he's blaming CBS for becoming the face of liberal media bias.
According to Dan, it's not his fault that he presented fake documents to support a specious story about President Bush's air national guard service a month before the 2004 election.
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...
Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS — and later the outside panel it commissioned — concluded that the report was based on documents that could not be authenticated. 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.”
I doubt seriously that Dan would have considered his role to be so small and inconsequential had the scheme worked and John Kerry won the November elections. Dan's not known for his humility, after all. And his "fake but accurate" defense has become television history. Why not believe that he didn't wish to apologize? It just goes with his reputation as a pompous ass.
He now leads a weekly news program on HDNet — an obscure cable channel in which he is seen by only a small fraction of the millions of viewers who once turned to him in his heyday to receive the news of the day.
The bottom line: Dan messed up and now wants to blame CBS for his downfall. He claims that the network denied him staff and exposure for his stories after the fake document debacle, as though it is uncommon for an employer to want to be rid of incompetent personnel. This isn't surprising. It's always someone else's fault with the left.
Newsbusters has video of Dan decrying lawsuit-happy Americans.
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