Fox Nation to Air Documentary on Anchor Dan Rather: ‘The Birth of Fake News’
Fox Nation is premiering a new documentary on CBS News and anchor Dan Rather‘s 2004 coverage of memos regarding then-president George W. Bush.
Airing for the first time this evening, the special — “Black Eye: Dan Rather and the Birth of Fake News” — will focus on a story that was published regarding the 43rd president, alleging that he had received special treatment during his time in the Texas Air National Guard. After receiving backlash for using fake memos to support the Bush claim, CBS and Rather retracted the story and apologized two weeks later.
The documentary takes a look at the bloggers who called into question the documents, including Powerline’s Scott Johnson — whose reporting went viral after being linked to by the Drudge Report.
“Hit the publish button at 7:51 am and left for work,” Johnson said. “Well around noon or one o’clock our time… the Drudge Report had put an upside down red siren on it, screaming ’60 Minutes fraud’ or something like that and if you clicked on it, it linked to Powerline. All of a sudden as opposed to the five or six thousand readers a day that we had at the time we had 500,000.”
In a preview clip, Fox News’s Howard Kurtz, who also appears in the doc, explained: “The bloggers, who were a new phenomenon in the media world at the time, really were the first ones to blow the whistle on the 60 Minutes story and Dan Rather. They are the ones who raised the questions that we needed to answer about those documents, were they real? Could they really have been typed in 1972 and 1973 or were they created later by some sort of Microsoft Word? They got down into the details about font size and spacing in a way that wouldn’t have been possible for ordinary journalists who wouldn’t have had that kind of knowledge.”
Rather has yet to react to the documentary. Last night, he lamented the poor tastes of “contemporary news consumers,” cautioning: “wander into the briar patch of ‘false equivalence’ at your peril.”
The documentary will be narrated by actor and writer Marc Menchaca.
Watch a clip above, via Fox Nation.
