One of the great things about not being Dan Rather, [is] I can talk about Gary Condit as much as I want.

Bill Maher on WABC-TV's Politically Incorrect, July 26.

The earliest image I have of a journalist, is from 1968. While reporting live to millions of viewers across the nation from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Dan Rather is suddenly accosted by a gang of unidentified goons. While they don't beat up Rather, they shove him around, and it is clear that they may do with him as they please. That scene on the convention floor symbolized the chaos of Democratic Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago at that moment.

Dan Rather, for all his stiff nerdiness, was a heroic reporter. He added to his legendary status in the news business in 1974, by relentlessly asking President Richard Nixon damaging questions, born of intimate knowledge of the unraveling Watergate conspiracy, in the final months of the Nixon Administration. At one point, Nixon sought to humiliate Rather, asking him, "Are you running for something?" Instead, Rather retorted, "No Sir, are you?"

Those were the days. In the twenty years since Dan Rather succeeded the beloved Walter Cronkite as CBS Evening News anchorman, he has not been roughed up, but his reputation has taken a beating. There was the time he stalked off the job, peeved that a tennis match was running overtime. That almost cost him his job.

And then there was the Black Eye at Black Rock of the Bush interview. In 1988, media guru Roger Ailes, suckered Rather into conducting a live interview with Vice-President George Bush, then the Republican presidential candidate. Journalists don't like to conduct live interviews, because they then lose the power of the final cut. Being able to cut a story means being able to shape it. Instead, Ailes and Bush did the shaping, with Bush, in a politician's fantasy come true, going on the offensive, attacking Rather.

For years, as Rather has wallowed in third place, miles behind Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings in the network news ratings, he has gotten increasingly irascible, and uninhibited about letting his biases show, though he refuses to admit to them. Last March 21, he appeared as a presenter at a Democratic Party fundraiser put on in Texas by his daughter, Robin. Although he apologized afterward, he should have known better, in the first place.

More recently, he has decided that the disappearance of Chandra Levy is NOT a national news story.

This is amazing stuff. For generations, socialist journalists prattled on about the "public's right to know," as they have destroyed reputations, careers, and families, prying ever deeper into the private lives of Republican politicians, based on the wispiest of rumors.

And Dan Rather was one of those journalists, as he showed in 1992, pounding away with non-stories attacking liberal Republican Senator Bob Packwood, non-stories that helped force Packwood to resign from the Senate, and again last August, when he "reported" as fact a phony story claiming that the Gore campaign was victimized by a story leaked by Republican operatives, when as the Media Research Center reported, the source of the story was a federal judge who had been named to the bench by Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

And now, all of a sudden, the bizarre behavior of a Democratic congressman whose young lover has disappeared without a trace, is off limits. Rather is angry, because according to him, other networks and periodicals have been spreading wild, unsubstantiated rumors in the Chandra Levy case.

Back in 1992, liberal Republican Sen. Bob Packwood would have greatly appreciated such restraint from Rather, but none was forthcoming. Packwood was guilty of no more than planting a couple of unwanted kisses on women -- matters which the National Organization of Women and the socialist media whitewashed in the case of Bill Clinton. But Dan Rather didn't suffer "the Buckwheats" when it came to destroying Bob Packwood's political career.

We don't know if Gary Condit played a role in Chandra Levy's disappearance, but we do know that the Levy case is news, and that Gary Condit made it news, in spite of himself.

When a married congressman on the House Intelligence Subcommittee is caught lying about the affair he has been carrying on with a young lover who has suddenly disappeared;

When he is caught lying, in claiming to have been with a reporter (ABC's Rebecca Cooper) on the date of the disappearance (May 1), when the meeting actually occurred one day later;

When the congressman's lawyer appears to seek to suborn perjury, in asking one of his lovers (Ann Marie Smith) to sign an affidavit swearing, on penalty of perjury, that she and the congressman were never lovers;

When the congressman's staffers suggest misleadingly that he owns no car, when he does own a car;

When the congressman hires a new lawyer (Abbe Lowell), who sets up a phony-baloney "polygraph test" whose questions and answers are never released to police, who were not permitted to witness the test;

When the congressman hires a PR pit bull (Maria Ein), who spends her time smearing the reputation of the missing lover, and who then tries, futilely, to lie her way out of the smear, and also gets caught lying about an as yet unpublished story about the missing woman;

When the congressman is seen trying to discard, far from home, the box an expensive watch came in;

And finally, when the Washington, D.C. police interview the man on FOUR, SEPARATE DATES, that's news.

And when Dan Rather's bosses finally forced him to report on the case, he botched it. He then suggested those bosses were cowards in a radio interview, in which he used some colorful language which white conservatives and a number of lesser-known or fading civil rights leaders have seized upon as racist. Indeed, a conservative radio host once was suspended for using the same term ("Buckwheat"), and other white media figures have been fired, and even permanently whitelisted from their professions for much less.

And yet, for refusing to report a story, Dan Rather has suddenly emerged as a hero to the same socialist media moralists who are forever defending the public's "right to know," and who are always reminding us in other cases that the subject of rumors is a Republican. Suddenly, they have all forgotten about the public's right to know, and they forget to mention that the subject of rumors in this case is a Democrat. The members of Dan Rather's amen corner have also gone deaf to his racial faux pas.

On July 14, New York Post reporters Michael Starr and Leonard Greene noted that, "Rather has yet to utter a single word on the air about Levy's disappearance or Rep. Gary Condit's alleged affair with her - but the scandal has been getting major airtime on Fox News Channel, CNN, ABC and NBC for weeks.

"Rather's 'No Condit' streak on the CBS Evening News continued last night, when he ignored the news that the Modesto, Calif., congressman had passed a lie-detector test arranged by his lawyers.

"Nothing. Nada. Zilch....

"Steve Capus, executive producer of NBC's Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, says the Condit-Levy story 'passes all the tests' of a legitimate network news story.

"'The fact that it's a mystery about [Levy's] disappearance, that FBI crime technicians are going through Condit's home trying to see if something is there - there are any number of news angles here,' he says.

"'If you look back over the last 10 days, there's been some real movement in the investigation,' Capus says. 'Condit's story has changed . . . and that raises all kinds of questions for us.

"'Any journalist would say, 'What's going on here?'"

"Media analysts agreed."

"'For journalists, this story contains the holy trinity of news hooks - it has sex, a politician and has the loaded word "intern," says media watchdog Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

"Rather appears to be the lone holdout at CBS News. Other CBS News shows - including weekend editions of the CBS Evening News, The Early Show and Face the Nation - have covered the Condit-Levy case."

On July 18, under orders from his bosses at CBS, Rather did his first, and so far, only a story on the Chandra Levy case -- and misreported it! He reported that the FBI had handed the case over to its "cold case squad." But as the FBI's Chris Murray told me, the FBI has never been in charge of the case, but rather has been assisting the D.C. Metropolitan Police through the "major case squad" (not any "cold case squad") of the Bureau's Washington Field Office.

"The Major Case squad has been involved in the Chandra Levy disappearance investigation from early on. It is not correct to call this squad the 'Cold Case' squad."

Copyright 2001 by Nicholas Stix. All rights reserved.
Don't bring around a crowd,
to reign on my parade!