When all of Dan Rather's problems started a few weeks ago after someone brought up the fact that it was an interview between him and Daddy Bush that took the "wimp" label off Daddy. So it seems interesting that Rather again would be the reporter that helps a Bush out with a tricky issue. Why would the most "liberal" anchorman play along with his own personal destruction? That's one question about this situation. The other thing that came to mind was a quote from a BBC interview that Rather did in May 2002:

HOLT:
And Rather told us with the nation so stirred, it's become almost impossible to hold the Government to account.

RATHER:
(Anchor, CBS Evening News)
It's an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tyres around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I'm humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.

So what we see from this is the fact that newsrooms in this country were and are being censored. I think Dan Rather got fed up with this story not being covered and went out on a limb, a very rickety limb and I think he knew it was. Greg Palast is on the case, The lynching of Dan Rather, and he does a better job than I can:

This is not a story about Dan Rather. The white millionaire celebrity can defend himself without my help. This is really a story about fear, the fear that stops other reporters in the US from following the evidence about this administration to where it leads. American news guys and news gals, practicing their smiles, adjusting their hairspray levels, bleaching their teeth and performing all the other activities that are at the heart of US TV journalism, will look to the treatment of Dan Rather and say, "Not me, babe." No questions will be asked, as Dan predicted, lest they risk necklacing and their careers as news actors burnt to death.

Remember no one has attacked the content of these memos. Now to get a better sense of the frustration Dan Rather may have been feeling, Your Media is Killing You, this goes to the heart of the matter:

The first part is the degree to which these nationally broadcast news stations have become compromised by the corporations that own them. The ownership of the media is key to understanding the process. Take the example of General Electric, owners of NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. This company is one of the largest defense contractors in America; they get paid every time we go to war, and yet we somehow believe they will tell us the truth of war, even though it affects their profit margin. Such thinking is folly.

And Maureen Farrell brings it all back around to where we are headed, When Fascism Comes to America,

Which brings us back to Sinclair Lewis. "Where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!," he wrote in It Can't Happen Here.

Many of us remember watching the Vietnam War in our living rooms. We can tell you exactly where we were when John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were shot. We recall what we were doing (driving our father's Ford LTD without his permission) when we first heard that Nixon resigned. We remember Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis and Iran/Contra, too. And while some things, like the My Lai massacre and "four dead in Ohio" left an indelible mark, we always felt that the country, regardless how troubled and torn, would be fine.

But something is different now.

It's quite a bit to take in and Maureen Farrell, as usual, has many great links in her article. But as I read through these articles I was left with an unmistakable truth. The mainstream media, which is corporate owned, is in collusion with the state to make what our government does seem OK. They are also both complicit in crushing any dissent from their party line, which benefits them. There is an name for that and the name is Fascism.

Bush gets Clintonian, again
What Is Bush Hiding?
But a guy who is supposed to be so frank and direct turns remarkably Clintonian where the National Guard issue is concerned. "I met my requirements and was honorably discharged" is Bush's stock answer, which does old Bill proud. And am I the only person exasperated by a double standard that treated everything Bill Clinton ever did in his life ("I didn't inhale") as fair game but now insists that we shouldn't sully ourselves with any inconvenient questions about Bush's past? Clinton and "W" I think have always admired each others political aptitude, shall we say.
- posted by Mom/Dad @ 7:04 AM