The Wall Street Journal's editorial today on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is excellent, as would be expected, and gives credit where credit is due:

In the debate over who deserves credit for causing the Berlin Wall to collapse on the night of November 9, 1989, many names come to mind, both great and small.

There was Günter Schabowski, the muddled East German politburo spokesman, who in a live press conference that evening accidentally announced that the country's travel restrictions were to be lifted "immediately." There was Mikhail Gorbachev, who made it clear that the Soviet Union would not violently suppress people power in its satellite states, as it had decades earlier in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There were the heroes of Poland's Solidarity movement, not least Pope John Paul II, who did so much to expose the moral bankruptcy of communism.

And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it.

[Editor's note: For more on the media's pro-Communist bias in the waning days of the Cold War, read "Better Off Red?", MRC's new study looking back 20 years ago to the fall of the Berlin Wall]

In the editorial's second-last paragraph, the Journal reminds us of an alleged journalist who was so blinded by his partisan disdain for any Republican in power that he refused to acknowledge what had become clear years earlier, and of the risk-averse weenies who tried to talk him out of delivering the signature line of what is probably his most famous speech (bold is mine):

Disgraced former CBS anchorman Dan Rather continues to make the rounds, trying to rehabilitate his image and paint himself as a man wronged by an overcorporatized, politically neutralized media structure. That's no longer surprising. But why would schools of journalism gloss right over his embrace of fabricated National Guard records in 2004? Viviana Aldous at The Daily Texan reported on Rather's Thursday appearance at the University of Texas in Austin:

“Journalism continues to weather its profound changes as it transits into its digital future,” said Tracy Dahlby, director of the School of Journalism. “Rather has spent six decades getting the job done, telling people things they need to know about their world they otherwise wouldn’t. He’s done it with courage, style, wit and occasionally the controversy that [often] comes [with being a] journalist.”

Is Tracy Dahlby really expressing an opinion, or just taking politeness to an embarrassing extreme? But at least Dahlby didn't call Rather the "world's best journalist," as odd as that sounds:

What would the current debate about the White House strategy to demonize Fox News be without Joy Behar's opinion on the subject?

Fortunatley, the comedienne and "View" co-host took the opportunity to raise this issue Thursday night with her guest conservative author Ann Coulter, and great fun was had by all including folks in the studio who couldn't hold back their laughter.

The fireworks began when Behar said, "[P]eople are p**sed off...because Fox lies a lot." Behar then marvelously accused Fox personalities Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity of playing loose with the facts just moments before she defended -- wait for it!!! -- Dan Rather.

The insanity on display led Coulter to deliciously quip about the media, "There`s more respect for Roman Polanski than for hosts on Fox News" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Jeff Poor, file photo):

Well the verdict is in and it looks like the GOP has been severely damaged by its opposition to Obamacare, well at least that was the conclusion of all the liberal members of "The Chris Matthews Show" panel over the weekend. On the syndicated show, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and HDNET's Dan Rather were unanimous that the "branding" of the GOP as "The Party Of No," has "hurt" them. The New York Times' Helene Cooper chimed in that the Republicans were "gonna be in a really tough spot," and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan judged "The town halls clearly hurt them. They turned the debate around in favor of the President."

The following exchanges were aired on the October 18 edition of "The Chris Matthews Show":

Give Mika Brzezinski credit for candor.  She has stated that during her 10 years at CBS, every reporter, producer and anchor she knew, with one exception, was a liberal.

The Morning Joe co-host made the disclosure today in the course of discussing with Joe Scarborough the White House's attack on Fox News.

Will Mika's revelation trigger a frantic internal investigation at CBS to root out the Republican interloper?

Radio's Don Imus on Friday attacked a litany of present and former CBS personalities including Katie Couric, David Letterman, and Dan Rather.

In an interview with Fox News's Neil Cavuto, Imus called CBS "Evening News" anchor Couric "a little rodent," the "Late Show's" Letterman an "angry, mean-spirited jerk," and former "Evening News" anchor Rather "crazy."

The outspoken shock jock also said the thought of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin becoming the Republican nominee for president is "horrifying" because "she's a dope."

Imus also had some very interesting things to say about his own controversy with CBS surrounding the Rutgers women's basketball team and "nappy-headed hos" (videos in several parts embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

President Barack Obama might be afraid to go on the Fox News Channel, but former CBS "Evening News" anchor Dan Rather certainly isn't.

In fact, Rather has given FNC's Neil Cavuto the first chance to ask him about Tuesday's court decision to toss out his lawsuit against CBS.

As reported by Mediaite Wednesday evening:

Steven Ertelt at LifeNews.com reported on Wednesday that former CBS News anchor Dan Rather will be the keynote speaker for a Planned Parenthood fundraising dinner in Minneapolis on October 13. The pro-abortion group, in its announcement for the event, made no secret that it thought highly of the liberal journalist: “Dan Rather, the voice, heart and soul of American journalism, is one of the most recognized and renowned reporters of our time.”

Rather is set to speak at Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota’s annual “Celebrate! Planned Parenthood” dinner at the Minneapolis Hilton. According to Ertelt, the former CBS anchor “ironically...is going to speak on the ‘new media.’” The LifeNews editor quoted from Scott Fischbach, the director of the pro-life group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, who took Rather to task: “For years viewers watched Dan Rather deliver the news of the day believing he was objective and fair, while the whole time he harbored anti-life views....Clearly Dan Rather has never been objective, in fact his support of Planned Parenthood proves how radical his views truly are.”

From TVNewser:

Breaking: The New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division has thrown out Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against his former employer, CBS Corp. "We find the complaint must be dismissed in its entirety," reads the decision. The Appellate court found that the motion court "erred in denying the defendants' motion to dismiss the claims for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty."

Of course, unfazed, Rather (file image at right above) has vowed to appeal (h/t Hot Air):

What a difference a political philosophy makes when it comes to funeral coverage.

Have you heard a word of complaint from the network anchors that perhaps television is "overcovering" the funeral of Ted Kennedy? Of course not. However, after President Ronald Reagan passed away in 2004, both Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather grumbled aloud about how his funeral was being "overcovered" despite the massive turnout of citizens when he was lain in state in the Capitol Rotunda. The difference between Kennedy and Reagan, of course, was their political philosphies which explains the vastly different reactions to their funeral coverage. So let us take a trip down memory lane to this Philadelphia Inquirer article written by Gail Shister in June 2004:

Television will go overboard on covering Ronald Reagan's funeral events, say Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC. ABC's Peter Jennings isn't so sure.

"They will be overcovered," Rather says. "Even though everybody is respectful and wants to pay homage to the president, life goes on. There is other news, like the reality of Iraq. It got very short shrift this weekend."

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather will speak at a $200-a-person fundraising event for the hard-left Nation magazine in New York on September 23. The Nation’s website advertises: "Meet Dan Rather, Jane Mayer, Marcy Wheeler, and Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Help Save The Nation." The panel’s discussion topic? "What Will Become of the News?...A conversation on the future of news."

Let's guess the verdict will be it's too corporate and conservative.

Vanden Heuvel is a big fan of Dan Rather’s discredited story/fiasco on George W. Bush’s military service of 2004. When he got the job speaking weekly into a the broadcast equivalent of a Dixie cup on HDNet, she encouraged him to dig deeper into his disastrous Bush scoop. (Gawker had some wicked fun with that.) Here’s The Nation’s promotional copy from the web site for Symphony Space, the event’s location:

On Tuesday, FNC's The O'Reilly Factor hosted FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg as the former CBS News correspondent highlighted a story recently posted on his Web site, BernardGoldberg.com, in which he complains of how little mainstream media attention was given to the fact that former President George W. Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam as part of his service in the Texas Air National Guard, but that he was turned down because other pilots were more experienced, and that CBS News producer Mary Mapes, even though she knew this part of the story before the report aired, did not include this important angle in the infamous piece by Dan Rather that used forged documents to paint Bush as trying to avoid Vietnam War service.

On his Web site, BernardGoldberg.com, Goldberg chastizes Mapes:

Don Hewitt, the creator and long-time Executive Producer of CBS's 60 Minutes, who passed away this morning (Wednesday) at age 86, had recognized the bias which led Dan Rather to target President George W. Bush with a 2004 story based on forged documents, as he suggested such a flimsy hit piece damaging to the liberal candidate would have earned more scrutiny for accuracy before it ever got onto the air: “Does anybody really think there wouldn't have been more scrutiny if this had been about John Kerry?” (Rather's piece aired on the weekday 60 Minutes, which Hewitt did not oversee, four months after Hewitt's retirement.)

Though in 2004 he predicted “I would bet I'll probably vote for Kerry” since “I know why I don't want to vote for George Bush,” in 2007 he recalled how in the aftermath of the Bush National Guard story he had proposed to Rather: “If this had been John Kerry, wouldn't you have been more careful about the story?” He also defended CBS's decision to fire Rather: “Any news organization, print or broadcast, has the right to protect its reputation by divesting itself of a reporter, irrespective of who he or she is, who it feels reported as fact something that reflected his or her biases more than the facts bear.”

Sunday’s Los Angeles Times had an update on Dan Rather’s continuing lawsuit against CBS News over what Dan might call the “forged-memos-to-torpedo-Bush’s-re-election-in-2004 scandal.” Rather scalded CBS with language he used to save exclusively for conservatives: “Their strategy is to string it out, wear me out, suck the will from me, and make it so painful on the pocketbook that I want to give up....But I don't think anybody who knows me would say that there's any give-up in me.”

But media writer Matea Gold said CBS had also “made available several executives who spoke acidly about the anchor whose work they once touted.” 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager trashed Rather’s work as deficient: “I hate to say it in public, but many of [his] stories were not even close to the standards we expect at 60 Minutes.”

Gold also said that Rather’s pursuit of CBS has brought to light the fact that the ex-Evening News anchor was turned down for jobs at: ABC, NBC, CNN, A&E, History, HBO, Discovery and National Geographic.

Would you believe that Dan Rather is calling on former President George W. Bush to lead a blue-ribbon effort to reform the news media? Well, obviously, the disgraced ex-CBS News anchor is not trusting the future of journalism to Bush, but in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, he is asking President Barack Obama “form a commission to address the perilous state of America’s news media.”

Rather insists he is not asking for any kind of a “government bailout” or “government control” of the media, just a high-profile discussion of the state of the media:

Why bring the President into it? Because this is the only way I could think of to generate the sort of attention this subject deserves. Academia and think tanks generate study after study, yet their findings don't reach the people who need to be reached....

As if the relationship between the Obama Administration and the news media weren't cozy enough already, former "CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather is calling on President Obama to "make recommendations" for the media on how to survive the economic downturn. 

Rather spoke at the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colo. on July 28 and addressed challenges to the news industry, which he described as challenges to the "very survival of American democracy," and insisted the president should step in.

"I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media," Rather said, according to the July 29 Aspen Daily News.

Chris Matthews, on Monday's "Hardball," invited on Dan Rather to remember Walter Cronkite and the former CBS News anchor – famously fired for letting his bias spiral out of control during the George W. Bush National Guard story – called Cronkite "a straight news reporter," and claimed Cronkite advised him and others at CBS News to "Tell it straight without fear or favoritism. Pull no punches. Say it like it is, insofar as is humanly possible. Keep your own prejudices and biases and feelings and emotions out of it."

After playing an old 1996 clip from an interview with Cronkite from his CNBC show, in which Cronkite admits to being a liberal, Matthews asked Rather to comment, to which Rather hailed that Cronkite: "Stood for, the beacon he sent out was, 'Straight news reporting. Whatever your political persuasions are, however anyone wants to label you, get to the story, tell the story as straight as you can and the American public will understand.'"  [audio available here]

The following exchange was aired on the July 20 edition of "Hardball":

In 1992, CBS "Up to the Minute" put together some clips of Walter Cronkite's first "CBS Evening News" broadcast on September 2, 1963 (h/t NBer Gary Hall, and don't miss hilarious Johnny Carson sketch about Cronkite in comments section):

As the media mark the tenth anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., it's worth recalling the overwrought coverage of ten years ago. Here is an op-ed by MRC's Brent Baker, originally published in Human Events on August 6, 1999 detailing the media elite's reaction to Kennedy's demise.

The sudden death at too early an age of the only son of an assassinated President is certainly a major news story, but the television networks wouldn't leave it at a few stories reviewing the good works of John F. Kennedy's Jr.'s life. Instead, they used his July 16 death as a chance to launch a week-long tribute to him as America's "crown prince," gushing about the wonderful contributions of the entire Kennedy family, recreating the myth of "Camelot" and praising the achievements of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D.-Mass). 

"He laughed off the attempts to elevate his status but, in fact, he was as close to royalty as this country had," declared NBC's Tom Brokaw barely nine hours after the news broke that JFK Jr.'s single-engine plane was missing. 

But the networks certainly did "elevate his status" by giving him the royal treatment. As soon as the networks learned on Saturday morning, July 17, that his plane was missing they all went wall-to-wall with live coverage, though they had little new to report as the day progressed. ABC and NBC even shifted their sports programming to sister cable channels. That night ABC, CBS and NBC rushed to produce prime time specials. 

Over the weekend, on his syndicated "The Chris Matthews Show," Chris Matthews asked his media panel if Barack Obama was governing as "more clearly a radical like FDR was, or more like a true conservative?" The latter part of the question -- the rather absurd proposition of Obama being a conservative -- actually drew a couple of affirmatives from the panel.

The USA Today's Joan Biskupic responded she thought the President was being more conservative, at least in his judicial nods, "If you look at what he's doing, not just with his Supreme Court choice but his appeals court choices. None of them have really caused a big problem. You probably couldn't name one of those appellate judges off the top of your head. They're sort of middle-of-the-road folks. Not taking a page from Ronald Reagan in terms of seeking lightning rods."