On certain days, disgraced former CBS News anchor Dan Rather really lets his bitterness show that he was put out to pasture for spreading phony documents around about George W. Bush in 2004. On The Huffington Post on Thursday, he trashed all his former television colleagues for wasting precious resources on royal-wedding coverage:
Remember the millions of dollars, hundreds of staff and hours of coverage spent on a wedding in London when crises around the globe and here at home festered. Remember the unseemly pas de deux between the press and a reality TV show huckster peddling racially-fraught falsehoods, as both interviewers and the interviewee seek a bump in ratings.
Try not to snort when Rather inveighs against falsehoods being peddled by hucksters (ahem). Then MRC’s Rich Noyes suggests you take a peek at highlights of Rather’s obsequious anchoring of a Special Report on the 1981 royal wedding, marveling at the carriage rides and wondering ("we all wonder") what Charles said to his new bride.
Rather claimed he had nothing against the royal wedding, but "What bothers me is the hypocrisy. The idea that we can't afford to throw resources at an important foreign story, but can afford to spend this kind of money on a story like the royal wedding is just plain wrong. The idea that we can't break into regularly-scheduled programming for an address by the president is wrong as well. When the topic was the 'Birther Story' (better referred from here on out by the first letters of those two words), the networks jumped right in."
Like many media liberals, Rather failed to acknowledge the networks were prepared to offer live coverage for Obama to announce his new national-security team, and then he threw out the "birther" press statement whacking the press -- sounding just like Rather did.
Whenever people start complaining about wasting millions of dollars on royal wedding coverage on CBS, that equation starts with the massively overpaid departing anchor Katie Couric, who’s pulled down $75 million for the ratings of the Evening News to fall backwards.
Back when he was still America's most pompous anchorman, Dan Rather’s CBS News very aggressively devoted millions of dollars to covering the death and funeral of Princess Diana in 1997, leaving the serious domestic news in the dust, like Fred Thompson's Senate hearings into illegal millions in foreign donations to the Clinton-Gore campaign and other Democrats in the 1996 election cycle. An MRC study in 1997 found the CBS Evening News broadcast 67 segments about Diana from August 31 to the end of September, but just 14 stories in those full two months to what Rather would call the foreign-dollars-to-Democratic-coffers scandal.
Overall, the networks broadcast 686 stories on Diana between August 31 and the end of September compared to just 113 stories about the fundraising scandal. That's a ratio of more than 6 to 1. Isolating the morning shows, collectively they aired 407 stories on Princess Diana's death, while devoting just 36 to the scandal. That's an astonishing ratio of 10 to 1.
