THEY HAVE LEARNED NOTHING AND FORGOTTEN NOTHING: Disgraced fake newsman Dan Rather gets journalism awards named in his honor.

No one does more harm to journalism than people in journalism.

The Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin unveiled this week two awards honoring disgraced former CBS News anchor Dan Rather.

“The Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts honor the process of journalism as much as the end product,” the organization announced Wednesday. “They will be awarded to professional and collegiate journalists who go the extra yard — overcoming obstacles like stonewalling and harassment — to get the story that tells truth to power.”

A spokesperson for the Moody College of Communication confirmed in a response to the Washington Examiner that the awards are, in fact, real and that they are not part of an elaborate joke.

“The Medals are named for Dan Rather, the legendary reporter and anchor who went far afield from his Texan roots but never forgot his humble beginnings,” the announcement continues. “He has been an ardent supporter of the School of Journalism and Media, inspiring and advocating for our majors. He is a permanent member of the Moody College of Communication’s Advisory Council, where he has been instrumental in its extraordinary development.”

It adds, “The School and the College sponsor the Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts to further his goal of supporting and defending bravery and excellence in journalism in the face of overwhelming odds. While journalism and journalists have long been under constant fire from the powerful, recognizing those who show ‘News and Guts’ has never been more important than it is today. … These medals in his name, to be presented to professional and college journalists, honor that effort.”

Adding insult to injury, the school then quotes Rather himself, who once said, “News organizations and teams within those organizations have to have the guts and the backbone to dig into stories that people in power don’t want the public to know.”

Absent from the college’s announcement is any mention of why Rather has not anchored a serious news desk since 2004. It knows why. The college simply would rather not talk about the thing that destroyed his career; the thing for which Rather is completely unrepentant. For those who don’t remember, he alleged falsely during the 2004 U.S. presidential election that then-President George W. Bush had gone “AWOL” for much of his tenure in the National Guard. Rather’s supposed “bombshell” story, for which he lost his job at CBS, was based entirely on forged documents.

When Kevin Williamson was hired and then nearly-immediately fired in 2018 by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after his crybully staffers melted down, Williamson reminded Goldberg that the Atlantic had always welcomed controversial authors, and specifically mentioned the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens. To which Goldberg replied, “Yes. But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”

When you’re in the DNC-MSM’s family, you can get away with anything. Just ask Dan Rather, in a May 2001 exchange with Bill O’Reilly that foreshadowed Rather’s downfall three and a half years later: