Former CBS anchor Dan Rather will appear on the network, for the first interview in almost two decades, to discuss his time with the network and career as a journalist.
USA TODAY reported on Thursday that Rather will be interviewed in an upcoming CBS Sunday Morning episode. He stepped down as CBS Evening News anchor in 2005 and left the network the year following after reporting a discredited report about then-President George W. Bush.
In a statement released recently, the network said that Lee Cowan spoke with former CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, who discussed his career in journalism and his work for CBS.
The anchor will be asked about the documentary “Rather”, a film about his rapid rise in the media and fall. According to USA TODAY, the film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It will be available on Netflix on May 1st.
Rather was fired after he published fake documents purporting to be about Bush’s military service.
The anchor used a special on “60 Minutes”, which cited forged memos that criticized Bush’s behavior in the National Guard during the 1970s, allegedly written at the time by his commanding officers.
Critics claimed that these documents had been forged in an attempt to make Bush appear bad two months before the 2004 elections.
After initially defending these memos, Rather & CBS finally admitted that the authenticity of documents had never been verified and they shouldn’t have been used.
Before a CBS investigation of the claims of journalistic malpractice, Rather apologized. After the scandal, Rather resigned from his position as anchor of CBS Evening News. He finally parted ways with CBS in 2006.
The 2015 film “Truth”, starring Cate Blanchett as Rather and Robert Redford who played him, was about the fall of the disgraced journalist.
In an interview Rather gave to The Hollywood Reporter in the year of the film, Rather stated, “We told a true story, but we didn’t get it right. We did make some mistakes in getting the truth. But that doesn’t change what we reported.”
Rather, despite his controversial departure, has remained a media fixture, appearing regularly on anti-Trump and left-wing media outlets. Rather was a regular guest on CNN and MSNBC throughout the Trump administration and is an avid anti-Trump Twitterer.
He was also invited to speak about “misinformation” on “PBS NewsHour Weekend” in 2021, warning on-air how “misinformation, outright lies, propaganda, all of this gets loose on the internet.”
