Recently, CBS anchor Dan Rather took to the airwaves and sincerely apologized for letting his political prejudices drive him to perpetrate fraud against the president of the United States.
Whoops! That's a news lead from an alternate bizarro universe in which up is down, black is white and Dan Rather has a conscience.
Back here on boring old Earth, the real Rather has stonewalled, sputtered and spun at every opportunity in a desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of what critics are calling the "Rathergate" scandal.
A quick recap of CBS News' nightmare over the past couple weeks: on Sept. 8, Dan Rather went on "60 Minutes II" with a series of memos that now-deceased Lt Col. Jerry Killian reportedly typed in 1972 and '73, each of them portraying then-National Guardsman George W. Bush as a sub-standard airman who disobeyed direct orders and had his records "sugarcoated" due to political pressure.
Slight problem, though: the documents were not real. There were literally dozens of telltale signs proving them to be forgeries produced on a modern word processor -- ranging from characters and spacing impossible to produce on typewriters to personal testimony from Killian's family that he never typed.
Conservative bloggers caught this literally within hours, but Rather stonewalled. He bashed his critics, tried to pass off a handwriting expert as a document authenticator and most damning of all, initially refused to give up his source, claiming the man behind the docs was "unimpeachable."
But on Monday, Bill Burkett (the unimpeachable source) was revealed. Burkett is a Texas Democrat from the Army National Guard with a long history of mental instability and whose political acumen runs the gamut from "I hate Bush" to "Bush is Hitler."
He has long been peddling contradictory stories that in 1998, Republican operatives ordered him to take part in the "scrubbing" of then-Governor Bush's Air National Guard records. Sometimes he witnessed it, other times he just overheard.
Burkett also claims that, for political reasons, Bush once arranged to deny him medical treatment, and that he only survived death by dosing himself with cattle penicillin. I could not make this stuff up.
In short, Burkett is a lunatic. Lately he's been talking to the press and it's come out that he had CBS producer Mary Mapes arrange contact between him and Joe Lockhart (one of Kerry's top campaign aides) in exchange for the documents that Burkett allegedly received through his mysterious sources.
And in one of life's stranger coincidences, in the same two-day period that the "60 Minutes II" story aired, Kerry's campaign released Operation Fortunate Son, their new ad campaign. It depicts President Bush as a privileged child whose daddy's political connections kept him in a cushy National Guard position while brave men like John Kerry went off to Vietnam (and possibly Cambodia, depending on when you ask him).
Rather, meanwhile, is apparently the last person on Earth who believes that the documents are real: he's admitted as much and has only apologized for using documents that he can no longer "continue vouching for," and adds that his errors were made in "good faith."
Let me tell you something, Dan: it's not in good faith to smear the president of the United States using transparently phony documents a teenager could have made on mom's computer, and then label anyone who questions your smear as "partisan political operatives." Nor is it good journalism to rely solely on the word of an anti-Bush crusader with a history of nervous breakdowns as an "unimpeachable" source for objective, stable information on President Bush.
The only good things that have come out of this story are that the status of the mainstream media's credibility in America's eyes has gone from crumbling to meltdown, and that the world of journalism blogging has scored its greatest victory yet.
Still, one can only be chilled by the possibility of what would have happened if Burkett had been smart enough to use Courier instead of Times New Roman when he forged the memos.
Dan, step down now before you let another fraud on the air just because he matches your political biases. Retire to Martha's Vineyard and watch as the new kids from the Internet gradually replace you and your old media buddies. Time's a-wasting, Dan, and that old "60 Minutes" stopwatch sounds for you. Tickticktickticktick....
Eric Spratling is a public relations senior. Reach him at Eric.Spratling@asu.edu. Read his blog online at ASU Web Devil.
