Here are two things the liberal media doesn’t like: Dan Rather and conservatives.
But it likes Dan Rather rather less. For one thing, Rather, when he was the Evening News anchor at CBS, got the network in trouble with the conservatives. For another, Dan is odd—his tone is off, too strident, too insistent, too much the prima donna (an odd, tonally off, prima donna at that).
So it was an easy decision, back when George Bush was riding high in 2004, to throw Rather to the wolves when the network got caught out reporting (a correct report from dubious sources) that Bush had cheated on his National Guard service.
It stroked the conservatives and it got Rather’s annoying presence out of the building. Almost. Except that the result of Dan being as annoying as he is means that he is willing to spend $2 million to prove that CBS was craven in its willingness to suck up to the Bushes. And he has now come up with documentary evidence of the Bush-CBS secret collaboration.
This is even more problematic now, because the Republicans have been defeated and because CBS is trading at a market low.
It is, in other words, payback time.
It’s a measure of how far both the conservatives and the networks have fallen that old Dan Rather can seriously mess with them. Or it’s a measure of how truly annoying, how deliciously annoying, Dan Rather can be.
