dan rather vs. the new world order

Rather lawsuit says he was 'scapegoat'

Associated Press
NEW YORK - A $70 million lawsuit filed by Dan Rather alleges CBS and its former parent company intentionally botched the aftermath of a discredited story about President Bush's military service to curry favor with the administration.
CBS spokesman Dana McClintock called Rather's complaints "old news" and said the lawsuit filed Wednesday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan was "without merit." Former CBS parent company Viacom Inc. had no comment.
The lawsuit claims Rather was made a "scapegoat" to placate the Bush administration after questions arose about the story, which concerned President Bush's military service during the Vietnam War.
The 75-year-old Rather, whose final months at CBS were clouded by controversy over the story, said the defendants' actions damaged his reputation and cost him significantly. He was removed from his "CBS Evening News" post in March 2005.
Besides CBS Corp. and Viacom, the lawsuit names CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News. The suit seeks $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.
Rather narrated the September 2004 report that said Bush disobeyed orders and shirked some of his duties during his National Guard service and that a commander felt pressured to sugarcoat Bush's record.
In his lawsuit, Rather maintains the story was true but says if any aspect of the broadcast was not accurate, he was not responsible for the errors. By forcing Rather to apologize publicly, "CBS intentionally caused the public and the media to attribute CBS' alleged bungling of the episode to Mr. Rather," the lawsuit claimed.
The story relied on four documents, supposedly written by Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Critics questioned the documents' authenticity and suggested they were forged.
CBS fired the story's producer and asked for the resignations of three executives because it could not authenticate documents used in the story. Rather was forced out of the anchor chair he had occupied for 24 years.
An investigating panel for the story, selected by the network, "never concluded that the Killian documents were forgeries, or that the substance of the documents was inaccurate, and it did not question the underlying critical fact that President Bush had received preferential treatment" related to the National Guard, the lawsuit says.
Richard Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general who made up the two-man investigative panel with Louis D. Boccardi, the retired chief executive of The Associated Press, said he was unaware of Rather's lawsuit. Reached at his home in Washington, he said only: "Our report speaks for itself."
Boccardi did not return messages left by The Associated Press.
Issued in January 2005, the 224-page report portrayed Rather as "pushed to the limit" with other stories at the time of the "60 Minutes Wednesday" report. He relied on a trusted producer, and did not check the story for accuracy or, apparently, even see it before he introduced it on the program, the panel said.
CBS rushed the story on the air and then blindly defended it when holes became apparent, said the panel, which was unable to say conclusively whether memos allegedly disparaging Bush's service were real or fake.
The fired CBS News producer, Mary Mapes, later wrote that the panel's examination of the story "read more like a prosecutorial brief than an independent investigation." Her book surrounding the controversy was published in 2005.
Rather moved on to a weekly news show on cable's HDNet channel, "Dan Rather Reports," but the effort has garnered little attention. When the show launched, it was available only in four million homes, a small fraction of his potential audience while at CBS.
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Associated Press Television Writer Frazier Moore contributed to this report.