Get Your Popcorn: Rathergate Trial Moving Forward With Discovery

It looks like former CBS News anchor Dan Rather will indeed get his day in court. On Wednesday evening Justice Ira Gammerman of the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan made a preliminary ruling denying the TV network's motion to dismiss Rather's $70 million lawsuit. "I think discovery should go forward," said Gammerman. Rather's suit, you'll recall, claims CBS unfairly shuffled him off the air after that infamous 60 Minutes Wednesday story about Bush's performance (or lack thereof) in the Texas National Guard. Rather alleges that being shown the door was just the network's misguided attempt to placate the White House and shield CBS's then-parent company Viacom from political fallout. You know, the usual reasons for dismissal from a high-profile media job.

Now that the case will be moving forward, Rather's lawyer Marty Gold wants CBS to start forking over internal emails and documents to prove his case, including exchanges between network brass and the White House. Naturally, this has CBS lawyers asking the court to limit the scope of the discovery. "It seems pretty clear they don't want to produce [the documents]," said Gold.

The article is clearly biased towards Rather, because discovery is a two-way process. Rather is going to have to get into the chair and testify as to his own conduct in this matter, where he and his producer used bogus and fabricated documents to claim that President Bush never completed his Texas Air National Guard service as required.

CBS doesn't want to produce tons of materials - that's what all defendants do, but you can be sure that they're going to be asking lots of uncomfortable questions of their own of Mapes, Rather, and everyone else involved in the process. And the end result isn't going to be pretty for Rather. Or CBS, which allowed Rather to ruin the network's reputation (such as it was) by peddling bogus documents as a legitimate story.