Dan Rather Threatened to Leak Fake Memos to NYT
Charles Johnson
Mon Oct 8, 2007 at 3:38 pm PDT • Views: 496
Oh, by the way, Dan Rather is a liar. Surprised?
He claimed that he wasn’t the one who gave final approval to air the infamous faked National Guard memos—but Drudge has an excerpt from Howard Kurtz’s book (which I’ll bet doesn’t mention LGF) that shows how much Rather had invested in this bogus story.
The night before the story was tentatively scheduled to air, Rather was sitting at the anchor desk, with less than half an hour before the start of the Evening News. He called Josh Howard, who had recently been named as executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday, and asked what they were doing to promote his story.
“We’re not,” Howard said. “We haven’t gotten the lawyers to sign off. The script isn’t finished. We haven’t even talked to the White House. I’m not going to start promoting a story when we don’t know what we have.” That was not the answer Rather wanted to hear.
“Other people are chasing this story,” he said. “We’re going to lose our exclusive. We have to get our hooks into the story.”
When Howard again refused, Rather raised the stakes.
“I’m going to give one of the documents to The New York Times to run in Wednesday’s paper,” he said. “They’ll have to credit CBS News. That way we can put our stamp on it.”
Frank says: