Former CBS anchor Dan Rather is set to appear on the network for the first time since leaving almost twenty years ago. The disgraced anchor stepped down from his role as the CBS Evening News anchor in 2005 before ultimately leaving the network the following year over a discredited report on then-President George W. Bush’s military service.
Rather, 92 will sit down for an interview on an upcoming CBS Sunday Morning episode, where he will discuss his career in journalism and the time he spent at his former network. CBS stated in an announcement, “Lee Cowan talks with former CBS News anchor Dan Rather about his work at CBS and his life in news.”
The former anchor is expected to address the upcoming film titled, “Rather,” which documents the arc of his career, touching on his prominence in the industry before it all came crumbling down following the controversial report on President Bush. The film is set to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on May 1.
Reportedly, Rather reported on allegedly forged memos from a commanding officer that disparaged Bush’s behavior while serving in the National Guard in the 1970s. However, critics claimed these documents were a falsified attempt to smear President Bush during his 2004 reelection bid.
Rather initially attempted to defend the authenticity of the documents that served as the basis for his report, both the anchor and CBS admitted that they could not be verified and should not have been used in the story. Following the report, Rather faced a CBS investigation into accusations of journalistic malpractice before stepping down from his role as anchor and eventually leaving the network.
“The story we reported has never been denied by George W. Bush, by anyone in his close circles, including his family,” Rather said in defense of his reporting. “They have never denied the bulwark of the story, the spine of the story, the thrust of the story.” He added, “I believed at the time that the documents were genuine. And I’ve never ceased believing that they are genuine.”
However, in the years following the controversy, Rather has maintained that he honestly attempted to report a true story while acknowledging that some mistakes were made. The infamous “60 Minutes” special that led to his downfall has become the topic of the 2015 film “Truth.”
“The great lie being spread by people who didn’t like the story was Number One, ‘well you know they retracted it,’ ” Rather told Variety in 2015. “The story was never retracted. What Redford read, which I had read on the air, was that a principal source had changed his story — so what we did was apologize for that, but not for the truth of the story.”
When “Truth” was released, the 92-year-old urged people to watch the film and come to their own conclusion about the controversial story. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts,” Rather stated in a previous interview. “And the fact is we reported a true story, and we lost our jobs because of that. They got that part of it right.”
Featured image credit: Moody College of Communication from Austin, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dan_Rather_(37906907591).jpg
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