The Gates of Rather

Having always been more of a Jennings woman (when I watch tv news at all), I now profess my admiration for Rather. What a thing he did on 60 Minutes last night. A deliberate and slow interrogation of that 86-year-old woman who worked at the Houston National Guard office when Lt. Bush was (kind of) hanging around. ["...secretary to the commander who was said to have written the memorandums, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. The secretary, Marian Carr Knox, said that she did not believe the memorandums were authentic but that she had typed similar documents with "the same information" that were filed in what she called "a cover-your-back file."" -NYT, Rutenberg and Zernike, 9.16.04]

Rather made a lot of what little she had to offer by the way he asked it. Regardless of the hype surrounding the memos, Rather is a fine journo. The only thing that struck me as odd was that if that had been a court of law rather than a television show, some of those questions would have been objected to and sustained. (So much hearsay!) Struck me as odd and slightly unsettling because of the style of questioning contained within a journalistic venue, but one can be happy there is still a press to tell stories in a moment like this.*

*Forgive me, I am just coming off a story I did this week about the press airing its own dirty laundry. My favorite quote to come from my interviews for it was from the head of a mega-big journalism program:

“There is a contradiction that runs right through the newsroom,” he said. “On the one hand, journalists obsess about what they do, and on the other hand, they are prickly and terrible about answering criticisms from the outside. It’s almost a complete schism.”

One could even say "complete."