Still Rather Complaining

Dan Rather apparently cannot tell when he crosses from simple hilarity to the realms of ridicule. Apparently not content with suing CBS, claiming that the network scapegoated him after he presented a false story that sought to impugn President George W. Bush's Vietnam-era Texas Air National Guard service, Rather made the astonishing claim today that government and large corporations were the primary reasons that he was removed as anchor of CBS Evening News. As reported by the Associated PRess, Rather told CNN's Larry King that government and large corporations have influence in newsrooms. According to the AP story,

Dan Rather said Thursday that the undue influence of the government and large corporations over newsrooms spurred his decision to file a $70 million lawsuit against CBS and its former parent company.
"Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news," he said on CNN's "Larry King Live."

So government has influence in newsrooms? Government was unable to prevent the New York Times from spilling national security secrets on at least two separate occasions last year, despite requests from elected officials on both sides of the aisle. And government certainly has not been able to influence the remorseless and uncalled for attacks on this Administration, nor has government managed to halt the relentless one-sided reporting engaged in by all the major networks on the campaign in Iraq. Nor has government been able to make the media wake up and cover events that actually deserve coverage, such as the Holy Land Foundation trial ongoing in Dallas, nor the case of the Flying Imams, nor the close ties of an elected official, Keith Ellison, to the Nation of Islam and the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR)- the latter of which is an organization that has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.

Big corporations? Of course news outlets are corporations that exist, in the infamous words of the Harry Potter journalist Rita Skeeter, 'to sell themselves". And there is no questions that they are always trying to better their sales. But the ideological content of the newsrooms- proven time and again to be far to the left of the general public has also caused these organizations' sales to fall, and not one of the news organizations in questions has tried to determine why their sales are constantly falling, though it has been posited in many places that the lack of balance in most if not all the so-called mainstream media. Certainly business decisions can affect coverage, but the wrioters seem oblivious to how their out-of-touch opinionating has causede their employers' stock to suffer. So we can discount this as well.

In short, Rather seems to have finally slipped over the edge into true paranoia. Regarding the panel that investigated his work on the fake Guard story, he told Larry King,

"This was in many ways a fraud. It was a setup," he told King.

It was Rather's own attempted setup of a sitting President and the blind ideological focus of his team, especially his producer Mary Mapes, who had been apparently chasing this non-story for five years, that caused Rather's fall. Yet he cannot even admit that he was wrong- all he can do is cast paranoid theories to his sympathizers. Nor can he take responsibility for his own actions. Rather and Mapes tried to take down a President and ended up ending their own careers. That is no one's fault but their ownm, and their sad attempts to blame other simply reveal their lack of maturity and ability to take responsibility for their own actions. This lawsuit and the wild claims accompnaying it are just the latest attempt to shift the blame for something that was entirely of Rather's own making.