In which we revisit Rathergate, and the bad movie about to be made of it.

Hey, remember that stupid, incredibly ham-handed, and only-an-drooling-idiot-would-fall-for-it Rathergate scandal?  Well, in case you were a teenager in 2004 and missed it…

:pause:  God preserve us, it really was a decade ago, huh?  I didn’t have kids then.  I wasn’t married, then.  Shoot, I was still smoking.

…anyway: CBS got a bunch of documents purporting to show that George W Bush went AWOL from the Texas National Guard and that people covered it up, because shut up you Republicans.  Dan Rather (remember him?) promptly ran with the story, because if the documents were true it’d have been a bombshell.  Only problem was that these documents were fakes: they were originally written in Microsoft Word 2003 and then made to look like documents from the 1970s*.  Once this was pointed out CBS ended up giving Rather (and, importantly for this article, his producer Mary Mapes) the bum’s rush. Continue reading In which we revisit Rathergate, and the bad movie about to be made of it.

Rooting for injuries watch: Dan Rather vs. CBS.

Via JammieWearingFool comes news that Rather’s lawsuit has been rejuvenated:

The anchor’s $70 million lawsuit against his former employers got a new lease on life today when a Manhattan judge restored his previously dismissed fraud claim against the network.

[snip]

The fraud charge contends the network’s trickery cost Rather millions by scapegoating him for a flawed report on President Bush’s Vietnam era military service, and then keeping him off the air – torpedoing the chance for a $4 million a year gig at CNN or another cable channel.

He now makes an average of $1.5 million a year at HDNet, the papers say.

Continue reading Rooting for injuries watch: Dan Rather vs. CBS.