”.. she’s openly admitting that if she speaks to the national media, it will hurt her chances of getting elected.”

Well, let’s be fair: she is running in a Delaware election, not a national one, so it would be reasonable to stick to Delaware news orgs. (Or is she ducking from them as well?)

About Dan Rather: the Bush story didn’t “depend on” an (apparently) forged document - it was something that came in late, and as it fit with everything else in CBS’s investigation, they weren’t as careful in vetting it as they should have been. As for the content - the secretary to the purported author (deceased) said no, she hadn’t typed it, but it did reflect his view of GW.

If CBS had any guts, they would have said something like “Look, questions have been raised about the authenticity of the letter we included, so in the interest of fairness, we are running the same story next week with any reference to the dubious letter removed.” And gone ahead and aired the corrected story.

(I thought that ABC could have done the same thing years before, when they ran a story on the tobacco industry. There were a couple of minor errors in the story, which the tobacco PR people seized on, and ABC had to admit were errors. Big tobacco took the admission to discredit the whole story. I thought ABC should have said, “Yes, we made some errors, so in the interest of fairness, we are running the same story next week, with the errors corrected, as the tobacco industry acknowledges the rest of the report is accurate.” Of course, they didn’t do any such thing. No guts. )