REVISIONISM: Remember ‘Memogate’? Makers of a Dan Rather Film Don’t.

They rushed the documents onto air, and then, when the story exploded in their face, they spent an unconscionably long time attacking the people who had pointed out the glaring issues with their source material. They clung to theories along the lines of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian assiduously fiddling with the margin stops on his typewriter, such that they coincidentally lined up exactly with the defaults in as-yet-uninvented Microsoft Word. For two weeks, they dragged their network through a professional embarrassment of a scale that has rarely been reached again, because they didn’t do the most basic thing we’re paid for: properly vet their story before they started hurling serious, potentially election-altering accusations at a sitting president.

Okay, so that’s why Rather left CBS. But that is not, according to Rather, the story you will hear in the movie.

So it’s a sanitized airbrushing. Worthy of Dan Rather himself.

RATHERGATE UPDATE:

Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been ousted for their role in preparing and reporting a disputed story about President Bush’s National Guard service.

The action was prompted by the report of an independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.

Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated.

Sounds good so far.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis reacts. Here’s a link to the complete report, which is quite long even though the appendices haven’t been added yet. (So I guess I should really call it the “incomplete report?”) I think that many bloggers will be combing through it rather carefully in search of interesting nuggets, despite its length.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader notes that nobody from the press asked Bush about this at his morning Q&A, and suggests that they’re covering up for their fellows. Maybe, maybe not. But as a public service, here’s a “reconstructed” transcript that I just got by fax from a Kinko’s in Washington. I’m sure it’s authentic:

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Mr. President, how do you feel about the firings and resignations at CBS, over the presentation of a show designed to influence the election, one based on documents that CBS’s own experts said were probably bogus?

THE PRESIDENT: I feel pretty good.

Close enough for government CBS work.

MORE: TVNewser is all over the RatherGate story. So is Jim Geraghty. Both think that the panel pulled punches on the question of whether Rather and Mapes were politically motivated. Since it’s obvious that they were, I have to agree.

So does SoxBlog, which calls the report “half a loaf:”

Here’s what I wanted to hear and I bet you did, too: Number 1, the documents were forgeries; and Number 2, The CBS apparatchiks involved in this sordid affair were animated by their black hearts’ desires to wound the President. Alas, the Report says neither.

But here’s what you do get. The Report lays out the factual case of what happened here better than anything else that I’ve read. And the factual case is incredibly damning to CBS News and the soon to be departing individuals involved in this endeavor. Yes, the Report doesn’t explicitly say that the documents were forgeries, but no sentient reader could make any other conclusion based on the evidence it offers. . . .

I have a feeling those of us in the right wing blogosphere will dismiss the Report because it declines to make explicit that which we “know” regarding CBS’ motives and the documents authenticity. To do so would be a mistake. The Report lays out the facts and those alone are damning enough.

Indeed.

MORE: Here’s an observation that CBS is comfortable assigning political motivations to bloggers, but not to its own people. Meanwhile Hugh Hewitt says that the treatment of the political angle is a “whitewash.” That might seem a bit strong, but the less-partisan TVNewser agrees:

CBS may not have been advancing a “political agenda” — but it seems that Mary Mapes was.

I expect we’ll hear more on this. In fact, we already are: Big roundup here.

STILL MORE: Jim Geraghty:

Does the panel really think that CBS would have acted in the same manner in a seemingly-great story that would have hurt John Kerry? Are we really to believe that it was solely “competitive pressures” that led to this, and that no one in this process had their thinking influenced by a desire to see Bush defeated in this year’s election?

It seems that CBS’s unwillingness to admit this is turning into the big story.

I’m busy (classes start today) but Jeff Jarvis and RatherBiased.com have much more. Jeff’s best bit:

I see that the report is calling for more commissions and committees and all that — which is just the wrong thing to do: It puts yet more distance between the journalists and the public they are supposed to serve. They should be doing just the opposite: tearing down the walls, making journalists responsible for interacting with the public.

This is bigger than Dan Rather. This is bigger than CBS News. This is about the news and the new relationship — the conversation — journalism must learn to have with the public, or the public will go have it without them.

Indeed. But Dan Rather isn’t backing down:

Rather informed the Panel that he still believes the content of the documents is true because “the facts are right on the money,” and that no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic.

Sheesh. Will Collier, meanwhile, notes several dogs that didn’t, or won’t, bark.

MORE STILL: Here’s another CBS scandal:

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–A former columnist for CBS MarketWatch.com will pay more than $540,000 to settle charges he used his investment newsletter to make profits by promoting stock that he owned.

Thom Calandra, who wrote the Calandra Report for the company now known as MarketWatch Inc. (MKTW), settled the Securities and Exchange Commission charges without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

The SEC said Calandra made more than $400,000 in illegal profits by buying shares of thinly traded small-cap companies, writing favorable profiles of the companies, and then selling most of his shares after his columns had driven up the price of the securities.

Ouch.

And Johnny Dollar is rounding up the Rathergate-related TV punditry so that you don’t have to, you know, watch it.

MICKEY KAUS on RatherGate: “I’m not alone in thinking that the potential Staudt libel angle may be playing a big part in CBS’s Danron/’Memogate’ response. My guess (which may be disproved within hours!) is that CBS would want to settle any disputes with Col. Staudt before releasing any report that could provide him with evidentiary ammunition.” He has thoughts on gerrymandering and torture, too.

RATHERGATE.COM says that CBS hasn’t done nearly enough by easing Dan Rather out of the anchor chair.

Meanwhile the mockery continues: “Dan Rather Scrambles to Confirm Story of His Resignation.” Heh.

Lots more here.

UPDATE: RatherBiased.com makes a good point:

While he would have preferred to retire after his 25th anniversary as anchor, the scuttlebutt inside CBS had Rather stepping down soon after the 2004 elections due to a combination of bad ratings, long-time affiliate discontent, and viewer dissatisfaction over CBS’s ‘Memogate’ story.

Frankly, it’s a shame that it has to end this way for Dan. In the end, he became the person he most despised, Richard Nixon. Had Rather and the CBS management been more serious about viewer input and fairness, they would never have had to stonewall about a story they shouldn’t have run.

Indeed. And, ironically enough, the overwhelming desire of both Rather and producer Mary Mapes to “get” Bush wound up helping him, and producing another bad week for the Kerry campaign.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt:

Rather’s announcement is more like Ron Artest announcing his retirement, if only Artest would. Both Dan and Ron have consistently lowered the standards of their various games, and have recently taken to attacking their customers because the customers booed.

Ouch.

LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD’S FIRST MAN GETS IT ALL WRONG – NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS A PROUD AMERICAN.

The globalist revisionism of Ryan Gosling’s new film is all about “placating the Chinese box office and not adherence to historical accuracy. Remember that next time they talk about how brave they are as artists standing up to fascism,” Stephen Miller tweets.

John Hinderaker writes at Power Line that as with earlier Hollywood films that distort the truth of a historical American event, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK, an exciting movie when viewed as a fiction, but utterly devoid of facts regarding Kennedy’s assassination and the man behind it, or more recently, Truth, Robert Redford as a waxworks recreation of Dan Rather in the midst of his Memogate debacle, “movies live on more or less forever. An insomniac businessman turns on the TV set in his hotel room. He scans the movies available for in-room viewing and comes across ‘Truth.’ Hmm. Sounds interesting. He watches it. A young couple has decided to spend the evening chilling with Netflix. There is a film on a subject they have vaguely heard about, the Kennedy assassination, but about which they know nothing: ‘JFK.’ They watch it. Hollywood’s lies are forever. As time goes by, and fewer people remember the truthful version of events, their capacity to deceive probably grows rather than diminishing. ‘First Man’ represents a more subtle deceit than ‘JFK’ or ‘Truth,’ but it is deceit nonetheless.”

Back and to the left. Back and to the left.

OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE COULD SOON BE OVER: Jorge Ramos Eyeing Return to Mexico.

In the midst of wrapping up a media tour hawking his latest book and on the heels of what he considers – because of the election of Donald Trump – the ‘worst time’ of his 35 years in the United States, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos now says he’s pining to return to Mexico.

In an extensive interview with Spanish-language television personality Jaime Bayly, Ramos, who turned 60 this month, confessed he would like to live in Mexico again, at least “for a while.” “I would like to return to the country I left,” Ramos said with evident nostalgia, calling his desire to return to his homeland “a pending assignment.”

Bayly also singularly succeeded in both confronting – and getting the Univision anchor to admit – that the type of journalism Ramos practices includes activism, specifically when it comes to U.S. immigration policy.

Which brings us to…Children’s March Spokesmoppet Tells CNN’s Media Analyst Brian Stetler That “Journalism is Activism.”

Read: “Progressive” activism.

Stelter, whose frequent guest is Dan Rather (see also: origin of Pajamas Media’s name) doesn’t argue with her, and Matt Pearce of the L.A. Times concurs, tweeting, “Journalism *is* activism in its most basic form. The entire basis for its ethical practice is the idea that a democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function. Choosing what you want people to know is a form of activism, even if it’s not the march-and-protest kind.”

Note the admission of bias by selection with “Choosing what you want people to know is a form of activism.” Of course, when conservatives cheer a photo such as this, which has become symbolic of newspaper declines across the country…

… The DNC-MSM immediately switch back to “How dare you impugn our reputations and cheer for our demise. We’re totally objective, we just want the facts,” as if they’re the modern incarnation of Jack Webb’s Detective Joe Friday. The media knew the bell was tolling ever louder in both 2008 and 2016, when it went all-in on first Obama and then Hillary in the hopes of bailouts and subsidies that would have kept the gravy train alive a little longer. Without them, the bill is coming due for decades of “Yeah, I’m with the media, screw you” arrogance — which is also one of the many reasons for their vaporish reaction to Trump.

Oh and speaking of Jorge Ramos and activism: Flashback: Ramos Discloses Daughter Works for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign.

UPDATE: CNN goes all in as David Hogg fanboys.

IF YOU LIKE TRUTH, DON’T WATCH TRUTH: Megan McArdle watches the movie in which Robert Redford portrays the face of a newsroom working diligently to topple a Republican presidency — no not that one, the new one — and responds, “The original sin of the movie was trying to make Mary Mapes the hero:”

[Writer-director James Vanderbilt] could have told a great story about someone who made a terrible yet basically understandable mistake, and who suffered horribly for it. Instead, he wanted to make a movie about someone who did a good job in a good cause, and suffered anyway. Since this story is not compatible with reality, he had to do what Mapes did: believe six impossible things before breakfast, to avoid facing one, glaringly obvious fact that doesn’t reflect well on our hero. The result doesn’t really work on any level as a movie.

As a metanarrative, on the other hand, it couldn’t be more perfect: Just like his hero, James Vanderbilt got taken by a source.*

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

* Not the first time that’s happened to a journalist portrayed by Redford; which unintentionally makes Truth an appropriate bookend to Redford’s career.