Dan Rather

John Koblin looks at editors who moonlight as writers, and talks to The New Yorker's David Remnick who says, "As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically... Otherwise, it’s just the apartment and the office." Plus: As Economy Quakes, Home Mags Teeter.

Felix Gillette sifts through some recently released Rather v. CBS documents and unearths some interesting nuggets. Plus: Broke as A Peacock!

Leon Neyfakh reports on the Norman Mailer Estate's uneven relationships with Andrew Wylie and Random House. Plus: The Remaking of Ryan Lizza's Big Campaign Book 2008.

Plus: Rahm Poked Me!... Penny Arcade... Raging Belle.

On Jan. 10, 2005, CBS President Leslie Moonves sent his employees a novella-length memo with the subject line “The Independent Panel Issues its report.”

CBS had formed said independent panel months earlier, in the fall of 2004, in order to investigate the development, preparation and aftermath of Dan Rather and company’s flawed report on President Bush’s military service. The report had aired on 60 Minutes Wednesday on Sept. 8, 2004, a few months before the presidential election, and had subsequently embroiled the network in a scandal that came to be known as “Memogate.”

In his memo to the staff, Mr.  read more »

More from the Rather v. CBS docs.

On Tuesday, December 7, 2004, former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh sent an e-mail to Dan Bartlett, then the White House communications director.

At the time, Mr. Thornburgh was heading up an independent panel, established by CBS, to investigate the flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday story about President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, which aired on September 8, 2004.

"As I mentioned on the phone, we are in the homestretch of our assignment and would find it very helpful if we could secure written responses from the President to the following questions so that we can tie up a couple of loose ends," wrote Mr. Thornburgh.

Mr. Thornburgh then posed eight questions, after the jump:  read more »

This week, Dan Rather's legal team submitted a memorandum to the judge overseeing Mr. Rather's $70 million civil lawsuit against his former employers, which for the first time made public some of the thousands of documents that CBS has already turned over in the ongoing discovery process.

The Media Mob is still making its way through the thick stack of e-mails, internal memos and transcripts included in this stash. But we were kind of amazed by one document.  read more »

Dan Rather has signed on with a French TV network to report on the final days of the 2008 presidential election, Variety's Elsa Keslassy reports (from Paris!).

From the article:

Rather will appear live from New York on Nov. 2 in the mag "Dimanche Plus" dedicated to the elections.

He will then host the election special on Nov. 4 and will be back on the air the following morning for post-election comments in the show "La Matinale."

Dan Rather was back in court Tuesday afternoon for another round in his $70 million lawsuit against CBS.

In the latest development, Mr. Rather's legal team introduced a motion asking the judge for permission to amend their complaint for the second time. Marty Gold, Mr. Rather's lead attorney, said the judge had previously dismissed his client’s fraud charges against CBS on the grounds that no specific damages had been listed in the earlier complaint. Mr. Gold said that this time around his team has prepared a more precise estimate of damages, based on the difference between Mr. Rather's former salary at CBS and his current salary at HDNet.  read more »

On the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 22, Dan Rather and lawyers for CBS returned yet again to a court in Lower Manhattan for the latest ruling in Mr. Rather's ongoing $70 million civil lawsuit against his former employers.

There, New York Supreme Court Justice Ira Gammerman announced his ruling on CBS's motion to dismiss Mr. Rather's amended complaint against them.

In a decision that is giving the Media Mob a case of déjà vu, the Justice decided to allow the lawsuit to proceed, while also knocking down a portion of the amended complaint.

Afterward, both sides claimed victory.  read more »

Today Dan Rather will return to a courtroom in Lower Manhattan.

There, Justice Ira Gammerman is scheduled to make a ruling this afternoon on CBS's motion to dismiss Mr. Rather's amended complaint in his $70 million civil lawsuit against his former employers.

Expect updates as more news breaks.

Twice in the television era have the pre-scripted proceedings of a national political convention been badly disrupted – and both times it proved catastrophic for the party that put on the show.

In 1968, chaos in the streets and on the floor of the Democrats’ Chicago convention – punctuated by the unforgettable image of Richard Daley shouting epithets at Abraham Ribicoff after the Connecticut senator decried the “Gestapo tactics” of the mayor’s police force – led many Americans to conclude that a party incapable of managing its own affairs shouldn’t be entrusted with the nation’s affairs.

Four years later, similar chaos reigned in Miami Beach, when an endless parade of procedural motions from the floor forced George McGovern’s acceptance speech – perhaps his best chance to win a reevaluation from the millions of voters who’d come to view him as a fringe figure – out of prime time and into the wee hours of the morning, limiting the television audience to a few hard-core shut-ins and insomniacs who might otherwise have been watching infomercials.  read more »

The Media Mob has learned that a team of Hollywood insiders is currently working on a screen adaptation of Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power—the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, in which she defends the 60 Minutes II story by Dan Rather about President George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, which ran on CBS in September 2004 and eventually led to her ouster from the network.

Who would want to turn "Rathergate" into a feature-length film?

According to sources familiar with the situation, Producer Mikkel Bondesen, (his credits include serving as executive producer on the USA Network series "Burn Notice") is actively working on the adaptation with screenwriter James Vanderbilt.  read more »

Dan Rather and his lawyers were back in a Lower Manhattan courthouse late Wednesday afternoon for yet another round in Mr. Rather's ongoing $70 million civil lawsuit against his former employers.

Over the course of a 45-minute hearing in front of Justice Ira Gammerman, tempers occasionally flared as the lawyers for both sides argued over a number of issues, ranging from the scheduling of depositions to the transparency of the discovery process.

On the latter issue, Mr. Rather and his lawyers petitioned the justice to release a number of key documents turned up in discovery.  read more »

This past weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, Dan Rather delivered a wide-ranging speech that lasted some twenty or so minutes. Along the way, he criticized media consolidation, the corporate news environment, "message discipline," media cowardice, news-for-profit, celebrity fluff, "so-called human interest stories," sensational trials, gossip, "news you can use," partisan shouting matches, and a whole range of other journalistic sins.  read more »

Today, for the umpteenth time, the legal teams of Dan Rather and CBS appeared back in court in lower Manhattan, for yet another round of legal gymnastics over Mr. Rather's $70 million civil suit against his former employers.

Nearly two weeks ago, on April 10, Justice Ira Gammerman of the New York Supreme Court made his first major ruling in the case, dismissing 4 of Mr. Rather's 7 initial causes for action (including the claim of fraud) while allowing several issues (including breach of contract) to move forward.  read more »

The Media Mob has learned that after several months of hearing from lawyers on both sides of the case, Justice Ira Gammerman of the New York Supreme Court has just made a ruling regarding CBS's motion to dismiss the $70 million civil lawsuit that Dan Rather initially brought against CBS back on Sept. 19, 2007.

In short: The case will proceed on a limited basis.

Lawyers for CBS did succeed, however, in knocking down several major aspects of Mr. Rather's suit.  read more »

Yesterday the legal teams for Dan Rather and CBS appeared in New York Supreme Court, where they told Justice Ira Gammerman that the two sides had more or less agreed on terms for the discovery process moving forward in Mr. Rather's $70 million suit against his former bosses.  read more »

Today, the legal teams for Dan Rather and CBS were back in New York Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan.

During a brief hearing, the two sides told Justice Ira Gammerman that they had more or less reached an agreement on most of the issues, regarding the discovery process in Mr. Rather’s $70 million civil suit against his former bosses.

Lawyer Jim Quinn, who is representing CBS, told the Media Mob on Wednesday afternoon, that CBS had agreed to produce “virtually all of the materials” which Mr. Rather’s lawyers had asked for.  read more »

On Wednesday afternoon, in New York Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan, Justice Ira Gammerman decided to allow Dan Rather's $70 million civil lawsuit against his former bosses to move forward into the discovery phase.

Afterwards, Mr. Rather stood in the hallway outside the courtroom, surrounded by reporters, and said he was "pleased" by the justice's decision, which would "put us on the road" to finding out "what really happened."  read more »

On Friday evening, Dan Rather appeared on the Fox Business Network.

During the interview, FBN's Neil Cavuto asked Mr. Rather how he would respond if CBS honchos offered to settle his $70 million civil lawsuit against them.

"I certainly would look at it, that's not to say whether we would accept it or not," said Mr. Rather. "I want the truth to come out about this, and if the truth reflects badly on me when we get to discovery and find out what really happened in this case, then so be it."

Tonight at 6pm, according to an FBN press staffer, Neil Cavuto will be interviewing Dan Rather on FBN about subjects ranging from presidential politics to Mr. Rather's recent talk with the late Benazir Bhutto.

More bad news for Katie Couric and CBS: Evening News lost 1.1 million viewers over the last 12 months, according to ratings numbers for the third week of December reported by the New York Post.

By contrast, Brian Williams of NBC lost just 164,000 viewers, and ABC's Charlie Gibson gained 38,000 over the same period.

Somewhere, Dan Rather is smiling.

Last night, Dan Rather emerged from the cable news ether to speak at length with CNN's Wolf Blitzer about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the late former prime minister of Pakistan.

Throughout the segment, CNN played clips of Mr. Rather's recent interview with Ms. Bhutto for his show on HDNet (which you can watch above), and Mr. Blitzer peppered the Category 5 Newsman with questions about her qualities as a leader.

"She saw, perhaps better than most, the depth of the feeling of radical Islamic terrorists and she wanted to do something about it," said Mr. Rather. "And that was her vision. That's the reason she went back, knowing that she was in real peril when she went back."  read more »

Because here at Media Mob we never miss a trick on the Rather beat...here are a couple of the best revelations from former Observer reporter Joe Hagan's New York magazine piece about the Category-5 newsman's $70 million lawsuit against his former bosses at CBS, and what he hopes to get out of it:

Most notably, Mr. Hagan reports that within months of leaving CBS, Mr. Rather hired a team of three investigators to try to shed light on the ultimate mystery surrounding CBS's September 2004 flawed story on President Bush's National Guard service--that is, the origin of the documents at the heart of the controversy.  read more »

Former aviator hired to investigate documents was taken off the case by CBS—now, Dan wants him to talk.  read more »

Last week, lawyers for CBS filed a motion to dismiss Dan Rather’s $70 million civil lawsuit against them in New York State Supreme Court.

One of their arguments is that Mr. Rather is essentially bringing a defamation charge against the network. Yesterday we caught up with Mr. Rather's lawyer, Martin Gold.  read more »

The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar -- who's actually, you know, a lawyer -- has taken a close look at Dan Rather's lawsuit and CBS's motion to dismiss it, and concluded that it has merit enough not to get thrown out before discovery.  She writes:

The lawsuit isn't without merit and CBS knows that, and Rather does, too, even if his expectations about the kind of damages he's entitled to or his perception of his own lack of responsibility are all seriously off the mark. The best solution for both sides, ultimately, is to settle — and to close this ugly chapter once and for all.

True, maybe, but the best solution for the rest of us is obviously for this thing to go to trial so we can learn all about CBS's (alleged) nefarious plot to team up with Karl Rove and destroy investigative journalism.

Yesterday, in New York Supreme Court, CBS lawyers filed a motion to dismiss Dan Rather's civil lawsuit against the network, alleging that their former Voice of God news anchor was out to "settle old scores" and "to misuse the discovery process and the power of subpeona in an effort to vindicate his own faulty reporting."

Today, in a statement released to Media Mob, Mr. Rather's lead attorney, Marty Gold, responded:

"It is unfortunate that CBS is trying to delay discovery of the facts and a trial of Dan's claims. We are confident the Court will reject these tactics and and allow the case to go forward."  read more »

Wanna see a clip of Katie Couric making fun of Dan Rather for trying to decide whether to wear his coat open or closed? Ok, so did we.  read more »

Herein, CBS's 30-page motion to dismiss argument in "Dan Rather vs. CBS Coporation, Viacom Inc., Leslie Moonves, Sumner Redstone, and Andrew Heyward." CBS filed the motion to dismiss today in New York Supreme Court.

Click here to read the filing (pdf).

Today, in New York Supreme Court, in response to Dan Rather's civil lawsuit, CBS filed a lengthy 30-page motion to dismiss the case.

CBS executives also released a statement today, noting that they are "mystified" by Rather's "bizarre allegations" but will "vigorously" defend themselves in court if need be.

UPDATE: Click here to read the filing (pdf).  read more »

Tomorrow, Thursday November 15, marks an important date in Dan Rather's civil lawsuit against CBS.

CBS has until the end of the day, according to members of Mr. Rather's legal team, to file its motion to dismiss argument in response to Mr. Rather's suit.

Contacted on Wednesday evening, Rebecca Hughes Parker, an associate with Sonnenschein, Nath, & Rosenthal, the firm representing Mr. Rather, said that she had yet to see the motion, but expected CBS to meet the deadline tomorrow.

Media Mob has put in a call to Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the firm, which, according to court documents, is representing CBS in the case. We'll let you know when we hear back from them.  read more »

On Sunday night, James Carville, who touts himself, perhaps accurately, as the best-known political consultant in the country, sat down with Dan Rather at the 92nd St Y to discuss the 2008 presidential election.

But he was at his most passionate, by far, when talking instead about the 2000 campaign, and denouncing the way it was covered by the country’s two leading national newspapers.

The New York Times’ coverage of that race “was borderline criminal—and The Washington Post’s was worse,” said Mr. Carville, joining a growing list of commentators who have argued lately that the media was overly focused on superficial issues, and exaggerated Al Gore’s flaws while giving a pass to George W. Bush.  read more »

“A lot of people know Dan, and nobody knows him.” Two and a half years later, not much has changed.  read more »

'Democracy cannot survive, much less thrive, with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news.'  read more »

From The Times' Jacques Steinberg:

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005.  read more »

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“It’s a long road to Tipperary,” Dan Rather sang, tentatively, in a whisper-soft baritone.  read more »

“It’s a long road to Tipperary,” Dan Rather sang, tentatively, in a whisper-soft b  read more »

HDNet, Mark Cuban's new cable channel, issued a formal statement today rebutting a Radar report that Mary Mapes, the former CBS producer, would be coming on board with Dan Rather. Yesterday, Radar editor Maer Roshan said that his publication's story was "true" and "confirmed." Ms. Mapes said it was "not true" and "hilarious." The statement, attributed to Colette Carey, Director of Marketing and Public Relations for HDNet, reads in its entirety:

"Contrary to several reports in online news outlets, former CBS News '60 Minutes' producer Mary Mapes is not joining the staff of HDNet's investigative news program 'Dan Rather Reports.' HDNet has not had any discussions with Mary Mapes, and there are no plans, now or in the future, for her to join HDNet or 'Dan Rather Reports.'"

—Rebecca Dana

Flab-ulous!

To the Editor:  read more »

Flab-ulous!   To the Editor:    read more »

If it’s gonna be,” Dan Rather used to intone, striding through the CBS newsroom, “  read more »

If it’s gonna be,” Dan Rather used to intone, striding through the CBS newsroom, “it’s up to  read more »

Dan Rather and CBS News president Sean McManus had their end-of-the-Rather-era lunch today, as scheduled. The meal was at media hotspot Gabriel's, on 60th Street and Broadway, and lasted two hours, according to a source with knowledge of the lunch. They were "amiable and engaged in energetic conversation" throughout. Both had the ravioli.

--Rebecca Dana

"Karl Rove started talking to me again," John Roberts, CBS News' White House correspondent, said of  read more »

EASTLAND, TEX.-Three days before Dan Rather was to retire from the CBS Evening News on March 9, the  read more »

Once again, we're proud to have our byline on the same page as Joe Hagan's. Hagan, the Observer's TV writer, is way, way deeper into the CBS/Dan Rather/Bush National Guard story than any other reporter, and this week he's reporting from Texas with an antidote to the official version in which blameless corporate executives were cruelly betrayed by their, perhaps biased, subordinates in the news business.

Hagan has come across some taped conversations with the detective CBS hired, supposedly to determine the truth of the mysterious documents and of the whole story.

He reports that the detective, Eric Rigler, "went on to say that interviews with former National Guardsmen were leading him to believe the truth of the documents, if not their authenticity."

But for a variety of reasons, CBS apparently wasn't that interested in where Rigler was headed.  read more »

"This is not a real investigation," Rigler said on one tape.

Dear Dan,Courage.  read more »

Against a mise-en-scène of blue surf, swaying palm trees and a tsunami-flayed beach, CNN anchor And  read more »

"My advice to CBS News," said Larry Gelbart, the TV writer, playwright and comedy master behind the  read more »

With CBS anchor Dan Rather preparing to vacate his desk in March 2005, the campaign to replace him h  read more »

"I love this job," said 73-year-old CBS News anchor Dan Rather on Tuesday, Nov.  read more »