No doubt MSNBC’s Brian Williams is one of the fake news hall of famers. His fall from grace in 2015 was quite epic, but was he punished? No. He’s still on the air after some vacation time. But nothing will compare to the czar of fake news, Dan Rather.
Does Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian ring a bell for you all? I know it was a long time ago. It was the liberal media’s attempt to sway the 2004 election with some fake news story about George W. Bush’s days in the Texas Air National Guard. The infamous Killian documents were the source material and like the Trump dossier, it could not be verified, but they ran with it anyway. CBS’ 60 Minutes got pelted with buckshot (via NBC News):
CBS News apologized… for a “mistake in judgment” in its story questioning President Bush’s National Guard service, claiming it was misled by the source of documents that several experts have dismissed as fakes.
The network said it would appoint an independent panel to look at its reporting about the memos. The story has mushroomed into a major media scandal, threatening the reputations of CBS News and chief anchor Dan Rather.
[…]
CBS strongly defended its story. It wasn’t until a week later — after Killian’s former secretary said she believed the memos were fake — that the news division admitted they were questionable.
Some heads rolled, but Rather has become this unofficial elder of American journalism. He’s not. He’s a fake-news peddler. The original gangster of them all. The Killian documents were fake, Dan. Fake! But to him, and his former team at CBS, maybe they seemed believable, right? After all, with The Atlantic doing the same thing, peddling an anti-Trump news story to help better the odds for Joe Biden, are we shocked Rather had this to say about the anonymous-sourced story. Yeah, apparently Trump denigrated America’s war dead based on four unnamed sources with firsthand knowledge, which was confirmed by a couple more anonymous sources who confirmed the publication’s story that’s grounded…in anonymous sources. This is a circus. It’s a mess. And no one believes it. No one. The liberal media thought they had a MOAB to drop on Trump. It turned out to be a lead balloon—a dud of epic proportions. Still, Rather said that, uh, the story is believable…whether it’s true or not. Wait, excuse me (via Breitbart):
Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who left the network for airing a false story about George W. Bush’s military service during the 2004 election, doubled down Tuesday on his support for a story in The Atlantic claiming President Donald Trump disparaged the troops.
The Atlantic cited four anonymous sources who claimed that Trump called American soldiers who died in World War I “losers” and “suckers” in 2018, and also claimed he skipped a visit to a military cemetery because he did not want to get his hair wet in the rain.
[…]
Rather, hosting a show on “Radio Andy” on Sirius XM 102, devoted a segment to the Atlantic story, asking callers to react to the story. He asked several whether they believed the allegations were true.
Rather and several callers said that while they could not know for certain, they believed the article’s allegations because of other things the president had said.
“Whether he said it or not, it is believable,” Rather said.
Yeah, and this is what—supposed to give the Atlantic’s hatchet job more credibility…because Dan Rather, Mr. Killian documents, said it might be believable.
Have we all started using crack cocaine?
journalism is in a crisis. https://t.co/5WNKsbJ3kG
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) September 8, 2020