Portfolio.com‘s Jeff Bercovici breaks down “Dan Rather’s 70 million little pieces.” He writes “Rather offered up his best James Frey impression on Larry King Live last night, with King reading the part of Oprah Winfrey.
Matthew Felling of the CBS News blog Public Eye wrote about the case before the King appearance. He coins his own Rather-esque phrase: “Writing about this story while working for CBS is tougher than playing Operation while traveling down a bumpy Lubbock road.”
ABC’s World News Now created a “Dan” montage from the ABC News Vault, with clips from Max Robinson, Peter Jennings and Charles Gibson. Check it out here.
Below is a partial transcript of the interview, provided by CNN… and here’s the video.
KING: Are you saying that CBS, then, copped out? That they should have (INAUDIBLE) management?
RATHER: The management — the ownership and management. And, you know, what they did was they sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain. And in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News (INAUDIBLE).
KING: But there were some erroneous things in the report, right, weren’t there?
RATHER: That has not been proven. What — the one place, the one place that we were vulnerable — I acknowledged it and wish we hadn’t been was — I want to make it very clear, nobody to this day has shown that these documents were fraudulent. Nobody has proved that they were fraudulent, much less a forgery, which they’re often described that way. The facts of the story, the truth of the story stands up to this day.
And what is journalism? Journalism is trying to get at the truth, trying to separate bull shine from brass tacks. And the brass tacks were in that story. The story was true.
Click here to download the transcript…