Dan Rather Sues CBS Over Lack of Airtime

Here's a memo for Dan Rather. When you produce a story based on bogus documents and then use nonexistent sources to verify said bogus documents, don't expect your employer to give you choice assignments or air time. Indeed, count your blessings that you've got a job at all.

You should have been resigned to the ash heap of history for your stunt to manipulate the outcome of the US Presidential elections with just days to go, but instead, you still manage to get air time.

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.” As plaintiffs, the suit names CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its chief executive, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”

No, what happened was you claimed that you found memos showing President Bush's Texas Air National Guard record was something less than sterling.

What a bunch of pajama clad bloggers found was nothing more than a fraud and hoax. The documents claiming to be made contemporaneously with Bush's service in the 1970s, was instead found to match precisely the default settings of a Microsoft Word processing document. The type font did not match that which would be found in the offices of the Texas Air National Guard, and no sources could come forward to show that the documents were valid.

Instead, we got fake but accurate nonsense from Rather and leftists who thought that if you bluster enough, you might get someone to believe the documents even if the documents themselves weren't valid.

UPDATE:
Bummerdietz salivates over the possibilities during discovery. It should be rich fodder indeed.