FORMER CBS REPORTER SPEAKS OUT ON RATHERGATE

Good commentary.

60 Minutes of Fame
If Dan Rather's source turns out to be a partisan, say goodbye to CBS's reputation.

The Wall Street Journal
BY BERNARD GOLDBERG
Friday, September 17

On Feb. 12, 1996, I picked up a phone at CBS News in New York and called Dan Rather, who was in Des Moines covering the Iowa caucuses. It was a call that I--then a CBS correspondent--wasn't anxious to make. I'd written an op-ed for this page about liberal bias in the news that was going to run the next day. I knew I had to give Dan a heads up. "I wrote a piece for the Journal, Dan, and my guess is you won't be ecstatic about it." I hadn't given him any details yet, so he had no idea what the op-ed was about. Dan was gracious; he always was when we spoke. "Bernie," he said, "we were friends yesterday, we're friends today, and we'll be friends tomorrow. So tell me about it."

I did, and the more I told him the more tense the conversation got. After listening for a while, Dan told me, "I'm getting viscerally angry about this" and the call soon ended. And then the man who was my friend yesterday, today, and tomorrow told a number of our colleagues that he'd "never" forgive me for what I'd done.

What I'd done was not simply to say that there really was a problem with liberal bias in the news (if it matters, I'd never voted Republican in my life), I'd also broken a taboo, doing what no mainstream journalist (to my knowledge) had ever done: I'd given ammo to "the enemy" by very publicly saying, in effect, that the conservatives had been right all along. (full article)