Madman Dan

10:12 am, 9/21/07

Madman Dan

An embittered Dan Rather strikes at the soft underbelly of CBS.

The lawsuit, first reported by The New York Times, alleges that CBS violated Rather's contract by giving him insufficient airtime on 60 Minutes after he was ousted from the anchor seat at the CBS Evening News in March of 2005. It also claims that the company commissioned a biased investigation into the Texas National Guard controversy, resulting in a flawed report that "seriously damaged his reputation."

The lawsuit alleges that the company and its executives made Rather "a scapegoat" in an effort to "pacify the White House" after the infamous report was at least partially debunked by right-wing bloggers.

Actually, it was completely debunked. The memos were the story, and they were fake, printed in Times New Roman, a Microsoft font that wouldn't even exist until about two decades after the memos were supposedly created, using typographical elements that could've been done only with great difficulty, even on the era's most expensive, high-end equipment, nevermind a National Guard secretary's typewriter. They were so humiliatingly fake that even Michael Moore refused to get involved, that even Frank William Abignale, Jr. spoke up to denounce them. What Rather thinks "the White House" had to do with it is beyond imagination: Does he think widespread public disgust and his report having humiliated the network in front of the world wasn't enough? Has he been hanging out with my whacked out Congressman, Democrat Maurice Hinchey.

Either way, if Rather thinks the internal investigation is what damaged his reputation, he really has lost his mind. Of course, many of us suspected that the very first night he appeared on television to deny the forgeries, misrepresenting the problems with the documents and claiming that CBS had done their job, despite the very people CBS asked to verify the documents claiming they had warned CBS of their doubts or had been lied to by CBS. Then again, Rather blames CBS for his own statements, too:

Rather's lawsuit alleges that he was little more than a narrator in the Texas National Guard story because his superiors directed him to focus on other stories....The suit says the public apology Rather offered to viewers and to Bush on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 was written by a CBS corporate publicist, and that he delivered it "despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted."

Rather's protests that he was just a patsy might, potentially, have some merit, were he claiming that he was a fall guy for the fake memos, told to defend them and had no personal duty regarding their authenticity. (Instead, that might fall on Mary Mapes.)

That, however, is not his claim: Rather is alleging that he was forced to apologize for no good reason, and has, in fact, continued to state, four months after the announcement he'd be stepping down, that he believes the memos were real, seemingly arguing that since the creepy, Bush-obsessed Democrat who gave the memos to CBS couldn't identify his source (a mysterious woman he says called herself "Lucy Ramirez"), nobody could prove they were forgeries.

In other words, Dan Rather is suing CBS because he fervently insisted on systematically misrepresenting reality and, as a result, was not allowed to report the news anymore. It's so sad that it's beautiful.

Update: Ann Althouse:

Dan Rather's reputation had to do with the appearance that he was vouching for the stories he read on the air, that he was taking personal responsibility for their truth. He's suing CBS for allowing him to report a phony story....[H]is own actions, as he describes them, warrant the diminishment of his reputation. In which case, in asserting the basis for his lawsuit, he's diminishing his own reputation.

I feel like there should be a reference here to the Paradox of the Court, but, oh well. Beldar, on the other hand, wants tickets to the trial.

My first reaction upon reading this was to wonder whether the appropriate statute of limitations had already run. But I can't answer that question, because I can't tell from this story what type of claim Rather's purporting to make. I don't recall studying the tort of "intentional mishandling of a news story aftermath" in law school, but maybe I was sick that day.

My glee is tempered by my realization that this case is almost certainly going to go away before it gets to any good stuff..The law firm that Rather has retained, Chicago-based Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, is indeed a good firm. The complaint that Sonnenschein's New York office has filed on Dan Rather's behalf, however, is a nicely buffed and polished piece of garbage. The lawyers who wrote it appear to have been infected with Rather's own delusions...They allege that CBS was Rather's "fiduciary" - and I'm sorry, but that's so badly wrong as a matter of law that every one of the Sonnenschien lawyers whose name appears on this complaint ought to be sanctioned for making it (because when it comes to negotiating extensions of your employment contract, your employer is not your fiduciary but your adversary). Their tort claims against the CBS execs in their individual capacity don't even attempt to allege facts to show that they were acting outside their corporate employment capacities - making those another set of claims that are, in my judgment, so wrong as a matter of law as to be sanctionable. And the fraud claims consist of all the other claims repackaged along with an allegation that the defendants' bad acts were deliberate, and that the defendants fooled poor ol' Dan about their true and truly evil intentions for a really long time.

Do not misunderstand me to be saying that CBS did everything, or much of anything, even mostly right or in an even approximately timely fashion. They covered for Rather and his team for far too long, and the Thornburgh-Boccardi Panel was far too timid and equivocal in its findings. Rather and everyone else should have been publicly exposed, condemned, and fired for cause by CBS no later than September 15, 2004. And for trying to paper over Rather and his cohorts' fraud instead of simply calling it what it actually was, and for keeping Rather on the payroll instead of putting him on the street with all his "literally dozens of Emmy Awards" in a stack of cardboard boxes, CBS does, in a sense, very much "deserve" this lawsuit.

Yes, they should've, and yes, they do.