In a Monday interview on MediaBistro.com’s weekly video series Media Beat, disgraced former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather shared his concerns over the credibility of internet journalism: “The difficulty with some of the things on the internet...is transparency and accountability about who’s responsible for what’s on.”

TVNewser.com columnist Gail Shister sparked the discussion by asking Rather: “Are you concerned at all that there is the absence of quality control when it comes to so much of the modern platforms?” Rather went on to fret: “...you can put something on the internet that’s really terrible about your neighbor or about a friend or a competitor and it’s almost impossible to find out who the source is. And you can say anything about them. That part of it troubles me.”

Rather of course ended his tenure at CBS after using fraudulent documents to smear President George W. Bush just days before the 2004 presidential election. He showed little concern for accountability and proper sourcing as he used fabricated memos to claim that Bush had gone AWOL while serving in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s.

Give Ed Schultz credit for something: on his MSNBC show this evening, he hosted an amusing smackdown between Barney Frank and Ralph Nader, perhaps the two most morose public men in America.  For once, Barney was attacked from the left.  The gist of Ralph's rebuke was that Frank hasn't gone far enough in regulating the financial industry.

Frank was finally so provoked that he claimed/admitted that when it comes to regulation, Democrats are "trying on every front to increase the role of government."

Disgraced former CBS anchorman Dan Rather continues to make the rounds, trying to rehabilitate his image and paint himself as a man wronged by an overcorporatized, politically neutralized media structure. That's no longer surprising. But why would schools of journalism gloss right over his embrace of fabricated National Guard records in 2004? Viviana Aldous at The Daily Texan reported on Rather's Thursday appearance at the University of Texas in Austin:

“Journalism continues to weather its profound changes as it transits into its digital future,” said Tracy Dahlby, director of the School of Journalism. “Rather has spent six decades getting the job done, telling people things they need to know about their world they otherwise wouldn’t. He’s done it with courage, style, wit and occasionally the controversy that [often] comes [with being a] journalist.”

Is Tracy Dahlby really expressing an opinion, or just taking politeness to an embarrassing extreme? But at least Dahlby didn't call Rather the "world's best journalist," as odd as that sounds:

<p><img src="/static/2008/07/2008-07-20-SYN-CMS-Rather.jpg" vspace="3" width="240" align="right" border="0" height="180" hspace="3" />From <a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/cbs/rather_case_against_cbs_dismisse... target="_blank">TVNewser</a>:</p><blockquote><p><b>Breaking</b>: The New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division has thrown out <b><a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/Dan-Rather-profile.html">Dan Rather</a></b>'s $70 million lawsuit against his former employer, CBS Corp. &quot;We find the complaint must be dismissed in its entirety,&quot; reads the decision. The Appellate court found that the motion court &quot;erred in denying the defendants' motion to dismiss the claims for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.&quot; </p></blockquote><p>Of course, unfazed, Rather (file image at right above) has <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2009/09/dan-rather-vows-to-a... target="_blank">vowed to appeal</a> (h/t <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/29/breaking-appeals-court-tosses-rath... target="_blank">Hot Air</a>):</p><blockquote>

Sometimes the numbers in a wire service report are so ridiculous, you just know that they're bogus.

On Wednesday, June 11, a duo of Associated Press reporters, Chris Kahn and Sandy Shore, with an assist from Tali Arbel, reported on a study "green jobs" study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts. In "The Clean Energy Economy: Repowering Jobs, Businesses, and Investments Across America," Pew made the growth in "clean energy" appear more impressive than it is by vastly understating job growth in the rest of the economy during the past decade -- by a factor of three.

None of the three AP "journalists" involved, and none of the alleged layers of fact-checkers and editors at the wire service, had the intuitive sense to detect an error by Pew so pathetically obvious that anyone following the economy at all -- and that includes the folks at Pew -- should have known the figure involved was false.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the AP story (bold is mine):