Dan Rather takes aim at Bari Weiss' leadership of CBS News—he was fired from 60 Minutes for airing forged documents

In an interview with Variety touting his new documentary "Rather," out from production company Wavelength, he said that he hopes the film "may, in some pretty small way, help underscore the importance of defending the First Amendment and freedom of the press—especially at this moment in our country's history."

"I think rededicating ourselves to freedom of the press and the First Amendment is especially important," he went on. Perhaps Rather is not aware that Weiss' dedication to a free press is what got her fired from the opinion section at The New York Times. In the summer of 2020, as riots ran rampant across America's biggest and smallest cities, Weiss ran a column in the Grey Lady's pages from sitting Senator Tom Cotton advocating for the use of National Guard troops to tamp down the destruction and chaos.

Weiss' colleagues were triggered. Her boss was fired. The whole opinion section was redone with leftists in charge. Weiss left to found her own outlet called The Free Press, which has covered controversial topics and conducted deep-dive investigations. Rather moved on from CBS after being let go in 2006 and now runs a Substack called Steady.

Rather had his own kerfuffle over the National Guard. As rumors swirled during President George W. Bush's first term over his military service during the Vietnam War era, Rather believed he finally had to answer to whether or not Bush went AWOL or not. He came into possession of documents that, he believed, proved that the president had shirked his duties and he ran with them on 60 Minutes. The only problem was that it was fake, the documents were a modern forgery. Rather was undeterred and still believed that Bush shirked his duties—but the evidence wasn’t there when he went live with it. The whole thing is what cost Rather his job and he had to apologize on air on the way out the door.

Here's what went down: In 2004, as Bush faced the election for his second term, Rather got ahold of some documents that seemed to prove Bush went AWOL. Rather went live with the documents on 60 Minutes. After the documents were public, bloggers started taking a closer look and found discrepancies and were able to prove the documents were forged and were made on a modern computer.

It was Rather’s own bias and false assumptions that led him to shirk journalistic standards and run with the documentation even though the forgery could have been exposed ahead of the report airing, if only Rather had done his due diligence and let his team have the time to dig into them before going live. Rather had also exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after pushback at the network.

Weiss has made substantial changes in an attempt to remove or correct left-wing biases at both the news network and 60 Minutes. She’s brought in new contributors, including some who are not leftist journalists, and faced outside critique from left-wing journalists at other outlets, such as The New York Times. Some long-standing staffers and on-air personalities left or threatened to, but in the same way that Rather shook up the program when he joined, Weiss is shaking it up now. Her goal, she said, is to “speak for the seventy-five percent” of people, primarily in the center on both right and left, who do not get a voice in media.

If Weiss were speaking back in Rather’s day, he likely would have agreed with her. She said she wanted to speak to those Americans who are not on board with the vision of “the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be,” but who want to know “what’s actually going on in the world.” That’s a world, she said, that “used to be normal.”

"What's happened at CBS News is sad," he told Variety. "It is in many ways a disaster, not just for the people who work at CBS News—and there's still a lot of really good people working there. But this is a further example of big billionaire corporate power in bed with powerful people and the presidency to get control of these operations for their benefit."

Rather preferred it when other corporate interests had control of CBS and 60 Minutes and could use it for their benefit. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, an interview with Kamala Harris, then both Vice President and the Democrat Party's presidential nominee, was selectively edited to make her appear to have a stronger opinion on the Israel-Gaza conflict than the one she first expressed.

"Donald Trump has expressed his extreme dislike for '60 Minutes,'" Rather said. "So now he's gotten his way. He cleared the way for doing what's been done to '60 Minutes.' The wreckage of CBS News is everywhere and continues to this moment. I don't see how to stop it." Indeed, after the Kamala interview, Trump sued for election interference, further noting that the news magazine did not give equal time to both sides. Paramount, which owns 60 Minutes, paid out $16 million but refused to admit wrong-doing. 60 Minutes also agreed, in the future, to release full transcripts with presidential candidates after interviews.