Disgraced ex-anchor Dan Rather wrote for The Huffington Post last Friday about how Americans are in danger of losing their grip on our history, touting his HDNet special on 9/11. So if Rather cares about history, what would he say about his boss Mark Cuban and the HDNet folks putting on truther-conspiracy documentaries on his network in prime time on September 11, 2011?
Ace of Spades had the scoop. HDNet tweeted: "LOOSE CHANGE, a controversial look at the conspiracy theory that September 11th was an inside job is up next at 9:15pm ET." That would be right after "Dan Rather Remembers 9/11" at 8 pm Eastern. Dan Rather seems to have found the right location for his loose and imaginative career in anti-conservative journalism. He wrote for the HuffPost with his grandpa lecture about how he loved Ed Murrow broadcasts in World War II, then boasted:
I now work with a small band of producers and editors on a weekly news magazine on HDNet. The staff numbers fewer than two dozen, and almost all of them were born decades after World War II. For most of them Vietnam is history, as is Watergate. Some don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Cold War or Tiananmen Square. A few were merely teenagers on 9/11. At some point, current events, so vivid in our minds, pass into the realm of history for the generations that follow.
For the last month or so, we've been working on a program looking back at the decade since the terrorist attacks. Our focus has been on personal remembrances, including the experiences of a single mother deployed to Afghanistan and the son who had to grow up fast back home in Kansas. We have been fighting two wars for years now, for some who have sacrificed so much, these will be vivid memories. I worry that for most of the country who have had the luxury of detachment these wars will be too easily forgotten.
Another one of our stories is that of retired New York City firefighter Lee Ielpi, who lost his son, also a firefighter, in the Twin Towers. Ielpi has helped create a visitors center near Ground Zero to tell the story of what happened. And what sticks with you is how he feels the story of that day, what came before it and what followed, is slipping away. He says so many young people come to the center knowing nothing about what took place and that schools aren't teaching it. Hopefully the flurry of activity and television specials around this anniversary will be a chance to teach, but Ielpi's experience is a reminder of how we must remain vigilant in teaching history.
Is that what HDNet is doing? Remaining vigilant in teaching history by rerunning truther conspiracy theories?
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