National Guard Service One More Time
Courtesy of Dan Rather, who is mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. Rather has filed a lawsuit against CBS seeking 70 million dollars, complaining in part that he was sacrificed to appease the White House over the disputed report he narrated on the Pres-o-dent's AWOLiness in the 1970s.
The only question to ask here is how much money CBS is willing to spend to make this go away. CNN spent a couple of million to make the dispute over its "Valley of Death" story on the Tailwind project go away. (Interesting sidebar: Rick Kaplan, who was then president of CNN, is now producer of the CBS Evening News.) The Gannett corp. made the Cincinnati Enquirer pay 14 million to Chiquita Brands to forestall a lawsuit over its expose of that company's labor and environmental record in Central America. I'm guessing CBS might be good for somewhere in between--8 million would just about split the difference.
There is no likelihood that this will produce the long-awaited authorized acknowledgment of the general truth of that report. For one thing, Rather has apparently adopted the Peter Arnett defense: I was just reading a script. For another, the US political system has no use for "truth and reconciliation" processes. There are, I guess, reconciliation processes, but abandoning the truth is usually a precondition for that. I expect to see a lot of reconciliation in 2009, but not a lot of truth, and in another generation, when the next Vietnam moment occurs, we can rerun the whole sad story as if we hadn't already done this before.
Unrelated aside: Hooray for Gitmo. It's the only prison the mainstream media can refer to without wisecracking about anal rape.
Courtesy of Dan Rather, who is mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. Rather has filed a lawsuit against CBS seeking 70 million dollars, complaining in part that he was sacrificed to appease the White House over the disputed report he narrated on the Pres-o-dent's AWOLiness in the 1970s.
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.’ ” (The whole story from NYT is here.)
The only question to ask here is how much money CBS is willing to spend to make this go away. CNN spent a couple of million to make the dispute over its "Valley of Death" story on the Tailwind project go away. (Interesting sidebar: Rick Kaplan, who was then president of CNN, is now producer of the CBS Evening News.) The Gannett corp. made the Cincinnati Enquirer pay 14 million to Chiquita Brands to forestall a lawsuit over its expose of that company's labor and environmental record in Central America. I'm guessing CBS might be good for somewhere in between--8 million would just about split the difference.
There is no likelihood that this will produce the long-awaited authorized acknowledgment of the general truth of that report. For one thing, Rather has apparently adopted the Peter Arnett defense: I was just reading a script. For another, the US political system has no use for "truth and reconciliation" processes. There are, I guess, reconciliation processes, but abandoning the truth is usually a precondition for that. I expect to see a lot of reconciliation in 2009, but not a lot of truth, and in another generation, when the next Vietnam moment occurs, we can rerun the whole sad story as if we hadn't already done this before.
Unrelated aside: Hooray for Gitmo. It's the only prison the mainstream media can refer to without wisecracking about anal rape.
posted by jnerone at 2:15 PM
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