After running a great piece yesterday about how polarized journalism has become, Politico took a left turn Wednesday writing a lengthy puff piece on disgraced CBS News anchor Dan Rather’s return to the spotlight or as Politico put it, his “second coming.” While Politico’s senior writer Michael Kruse didn’t shy away from Rather’s own history with “fake news,” the scandal that tore away Rather’s credibility was only the backdrop to the gushing narrative of the “resurrected” journalist whose voice of “moral authority” and “love of country” “obligated” him to call out the current “authoritarian regime.”
Kruse started off touting Rather’s rockstar reputation among young progressives. Describing a recent public appearance, Kruse noted that Rather’s introduction elicited “long, loud applause” which lasted longer than the younger panelists on stage.
“His answers to questions landed not like the musings of a name from the past but as fire from a battle-tested combatant,” Kruse gushed.
“[I]n an unexpected, career-redefining resurrection aided by Trump’s shocking ascent, Rather has clawed back a piece of the spotlight,” Kruse noted, setting the tone for the valiant underdog story to come. But first Kruse had to acknowledge Rather’s own troubled past.
“The last time people were paying this much attention to Rather, he was at the center of his own blowup over fake news,” he wrote. “More than a decade ago, Rather was ousted from CBS in the wake of a flawed investigation into President George W. Bush’s National Guard duty during the Vietnam War.”
Later on Kruse goes into more detail about Rather’s “Memo-gate” scandal, but seemingly only as a way to let Rather vent about “right-wing agitators” that took down this illustrious man, (who still won’t admit that he lied):
On the air at the time, Rather was contrite. “I’m sorry,” he said. In reality, Rather was angry and unrepentant. “The right wing has been on relentless attack for some years now, painting the media as liberal,” he wrote in his notes, in the archives at BU, “which is a load of crap.”
After more than four decades, Rather left CBS, “reluctantly and downheartedly,” he told me, chalking it up to unrelenting pressure from those right-wing agitators on the internet and a lack of backing from executives. Producer Mary Mapes, one of the four who were let go, likened Rather in her subsequent book to “a dignified old lion trying to defend himself all alone as he was pulled apart by a pack of shrieking hyenas.”
The process of getting to the truth is an inexact science,” Rather said in a recent call. “And nobody has ever proven the documents were not what we reported them to be. We reported a true story.”
Kruse then hilariously cites the also disgraced Brian Williams as a friend who paid homage to Rather at his lowest point.
He received scores of nice notes from friends and competitors. “As a great man once said: ‘Courage,’” NBC’s Brian Williams said in a letter.
But that is only one small section of the exhausting read on Rather, which focuses on his comeback and popularity on the left for attacking Trump on his Facebook posts.
“One of the leading voices of the Trump resistance is not some black-masked radical or a marching young woman with a pink knit hat but a man with gray hair, a name you know and a neatly knotted tie,” Kruse touted.
He then explains how Rather’s age and long years in journalism has seemingly taught him that Trump is not just a menace to society, but he is running the presidency like an authoritarian regime not unlike-- you guessed it-- Hitler’s:
What’s happening, in the estimation of Rather, is something that’s menacing, something that’s never been experienced in the two and a half centuries of the history of this nation, and something he sees as a potentially mortal threat to its democracy.
He then told me he’s been thinking a lot of late about Adolf Hitler. “And I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler,” he added, “but … ”
Rather tells Kruse that Trump’s use of Twitter reminds him of how Hitler used radio:
He remembers how Hitler used radio, and thinks of how Trump uses Twitter. And he remembers his parents wondering out loud whether Hitler really meant the worst of what he was saying.
Rather added, "Look, I don’t know everything, but I know some things—let me level with you. Based on my experience … this is what’s happening,” before calling out Trump’s “authoritarian regime”:
RATHER: This is an old technique. This is what authoritarian regimes always do. Solidify their domestic base. They conjure up a cause and—see where this is going?
Rather even admits that he hoped coming back into the spotlight to attack Trump would be his “Murrow moment.” (Edward R. Murrow was the CBS journalist who stood up to Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and is Rather’s apparent hero):
For nearly his entire life, Rather has patterned himself after Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS broadcaster whose television shows in the 1950s stood up to the red-baiting demagoguery of Senator Joe McCarthy. Rather has been chasing his own Murrow moment virtually from the day Murrow retired...He would spend his entire, 44-year career at Murrow’s network looking for his own London rooftops, his own bellies of bombers, his own Joe McCarthy to take down.
And apparently Rather found his McCarthy in Trump, ie: “Hitler:”
That’s when we started talking about Hitler. And this gets to the question of whether this is indeed that Murrow moment Rather has sought for so long.
“Maybe it’s as close as I’m ever going to get,” Rather told me.
