Brave Sir William is practically in tears:
As a CBS News correspondent in the early ’80s, I worked with Rather and have known him for more than 20 years. Listen to me: There is no way on this Earth that he would have knowingly used fake documents on any story.It may be true that Rather did not vet the information supplied to him by producers, but few anchor people do. They are dependent on other journalists, and this is a huge flaw in the system.
Dan Rather is guilty of not being skeptical enough about a story that was politically loaded. I believe Rather, along with Andy Rooney, Walter Cronkite and other guardsmen of the old CBS News, is liberal in his thinking. That is certainly a legitimate debate – how for years CBS News has taken a rather progressive outlook. But holding a political point of view is the right of every American, and it does not entitle people to practice character assassination or deny the presumption of innocence. Dan Rather was slimed. It was disgraceful.
This is so wildly full of equine detritus that it almost made me laugh out loud. Bill may believe Dan is “liberal in his thinking” but Dan, on the other hand, denies, denies, denies it. He is mainstream. The documents are real. And that CBS report will be out any day now.
You can’t slime someone when you are speaking the truth about them. Hey Freaky Factor, what’s the frequency?
Bill’s real bitch is that in the Information Age, everyday men and women can finally call the rich and powerful media magnates on their hypocrisy and prevent them from hiding what Epictetus called “the darkness inside”. We all have it to some extent, but blowhards like Dan and Brave Sir Bill have made a career out of pretending they don’t.