Target: Dan Rather

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Target: Dan Rather: "'It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions,' the aging American journalist told the British television audience.

In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship and self-censorship which had seized US newsrooms.

After September 11, news on the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

'It's an obscene comparison,' he said, 'but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be necklaced here. You will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck.' No US reporter who values his neck or career will 'bore in on the tough questions.'

Dan said all these things to a British audience. However, back in the USA, he smothered his conscience and told his TV audience: 'George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions. He wants me to line up, just tell me where.'

"What is going on," he said, "I'm sorry to say, is a belief that the public doesn't need to know – limiting access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the war. It's extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted, and I'm sorry to say that up to and including this moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current Administration revels in that, they relish and take refuge in that."

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