Dan Rather: Easier Now for White House to Hide Wrongdoings from Media

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather said today’s mainstream media make it easier for presidents to get away with malfeasance.

On Sunday’s State of the Union on CNN, in a segment about Richard Nixon and Watergate, host Candy Crowley asked Rather, “Could a cover-up of this magnitude and going to this level happen again today?”

Rather, who was infamously ousted after he tried to pass off documents deemed to be forged to prove George W. Bush went AWOL from the Texas National Guard, replied, “An unequivocal yes. Let us hope and pray it doesn’t happen. Could it happen? Yes. In some ways–in some important ways–it might be more possible to do it today than it was in the 1960s and ’70s.”

During Nixon’s Watergate hearing, Rather claimed, “The whole press corps … didn’t want to believe that the President himself was involved.”

“We kept thinking it will stop short of the presidency, but the facts–and let’s be clear that what Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward did was they were primarily the generators of the critical facts that brought us to the point where it became increasingly obvious that at the very least the President was lying,” Rather continued. “That’s a tough word, but there’s no other word for it. But it wasn’t until late spring when I said to myself, ‘Dan, let’s don’t kid yourself. You know what the facts shout here.'” 

By Rather’s own admission, today’s mainstream press are less skeptical than the liberal reporters from his generation. And if a president is a Democrat like Obama, the mainstream media will give him a pass when the IRS targets private citizens or the administration covers up the murder of a U.S. ambassador in Benghazi.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin routinely brings up The Washington Post‘s coverage of Watergate to challenge the current mainstream media to investigate Obama more thoroughly on his lawlessness on illegal immigration. After the Post reported that the Obama administration ignored warnings about the influx of illegal immigrant juveniles from Central America to focus on his reelection and amnesty, Palin demanded that the press corps ask, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

“You may recall that those questions were asked of another President who was also the subject of a Washington Post expose,” she wrote.