Dan Don't Get It

Former CBS reporter Marvin Kalb interviewed retired CBS anchor Dan Rather on CSPAN. Dan still thinks the Texas Air National Guard had proportional font, superscript-enabled typewriters in the Mesozoic era, and blames the blogosphere:

RATHER: [T]here are some strange, and to me, still mysterious things, certainly unexplained things that happened about how it got attacked and why, even before the program was over. But I try not to bog down on it. What I learned is there are bloggers who have as much integrity as I or the most integrity-filled people I know have, and who feel that it's their mission in life to ask questions and keep on asking questions.

There are other bloggers, and I'll go ahead and say it, that some of the quote, "mainstream press" seemed to take, if not delight in our dilemma, uh, they picked up pretty quickly on those bloggers who were partisan politically affiliated and/or had ideological axe to grind with us.

And instead of saying, well they've raised these questions, for example, about the documents, are these questions true? Next thing I know, they were in mainstream newspapers, and away it went. . .

We dealt with a story that had thermonuclear potential for reaction. And instead of saying, we have to be prepared to respond quickly to any and all criticism, we were remarkably unprepared for that. I think it's fair to say and again I just speak for myself but I believe it to be true of CBS and I think it was true of a lot of news organizations, unaware or not knowing enough of how quickly bloggers could strike. And strike is kind of an emotionally-laden word, I guess. But both those who didn't wish us well and may have been organized for their own partisan political purposes but others who were saying hey, I don't believe this. You just don't want to overgeneralize, but we were not prepared to meet that thing. . .

I believed in the story. The facts of the story were correct. One supporting pillar of the story, albeit an important one, one supporting pillar was brought into question. To this day, no one has proven whether it was what it purported to be or not. In terms of [unintelligible "myself"?] it was he stuck by the story, I stuck by the story because I believed in it. He stuck with my people. Listen, I've made nearly every mistake in the book. But my attitude when we go into stories--we go into them together, we ride through whatever happens and we come out the other end together. And I, you know, I didn't give up on my people, uh, our people, I didn't and I won't. [Applause]

KALB: Dan, thank you. You said, I believe you just said that you think the story is accurate.

RATHER: The story is accurate.

"And I am Marie of Romania."