The Winners
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Rathergate.com: For a website with the URL Rathergate.com, this is like winning the Powerball lottery.

Mark Cuban: His hiring of Rather for his fledging HD network has been a high-definition bust. Cuban hoped that Rather would have PR value, something that has not been the case at least until now.

Conservative bloggers: Even though the case is in its earliest stages it is already providing gristle for the folks who took Dan down the first time. For example, Rather claims that his on-camera apology was “coerced” and that he did not mean it no doubt prompting more than one blogger to ask “Is he lying now or was he lying then?”

Media Watchers: Columnists like Tim Rutten of the LA Times have the best of both worlds. They belittle junk journalism while writing about OJ, Paris, & Britney as much as the tabloids. They get away with it claiming to be writing about the media implications of whatever train wreck they are covering (”we’re not writing about OJ we’re writing about the people writing about OJ”). This same trick allows them to inject personal bias into the story whether or not it really fits (example: a story about “American Idol” becomes a platform for the evilness of Rupert Murdoch). The Rather lawsuit is perfect because it is a mass media story with an actual political subtext. It’s as if Michael Vick had been funneling his dog fighting profits to the GOP. (See update below).

YouTube: This was a video story and will be played out as such. (Example).

Summer Redstone: Redstone lives for this kind of stuff. After waging war against pretty much every executive on his payroll, including his kids as well as Tom Cruise, Summer has just about run out of adversaries that he feels worthy fighting. Enter Dan Rather who made the mistake of listing Redstone by name in his lawsuit as well as painting him as a closet Republican. Summer just gotten five years added to his life.

Independent Sources: Just as the Vanessa Hugdens traffic is dying down, Big Dan steps up to the plate. There is a God.

The Losers
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CBS News. Having Rather in your life is like having genital herpes. It disappears for awhile and you hope & pray that you’ve just seen the last of it. Then, at the most inopportune time, the big red open sore shows up and you know you are in for a whopping dose of agony and embarrassment. These guys must wonder why this stuff doesn’t ever happen over at NBC or ABC.

Dan Rather: Sure he gets to remove himself from the “whatever happened to Rather anyway?” list, but it’s really pretty sad to see a guy living his final years in such a bitter, angry manner. You picture him at the Pearly Gates berating St. Peter and angrily disputing that it’s his time to go. “No Sir, it is not my time to go!”. Dan understandably loved the limelight but it can’t last forever. He should be spewing folksy sayings to grandkids instead of delusional sound bites that will inevitably come back to haunt him. One can only wonder how many of his friends pleaded with him to let it go before he filed his suit.

Update: Other than from Larry King, the reaction to Rather’s suit has ranged from laughing at him to pitying him (and this is from the left not the right). Also, I was partially right when I predicted this would be good for media watchers like Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times. Rutten did indeed dedicated his front page Entertainment section column to the story this past week-end. However he did not use it to attack Murdoch or Bush as I had suggested he would. Instead he used his space to describe Rather’s suit for what it is “one guys injured vanity at play.” He lists all of the problems with the position that Rather has taken and includes some quotes very critical of Rather as well (including Josh Howard, who was executive producer of “60 Minutes” when the segment ran, said, “I think he’s gone off the deep end.”).

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 9:37 am by Insider and is filed under Los Angeles Times, Media, Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.