Saying it is a “dark day in the halls of CBS News,” Dan Rather, the disgraced CBS anchor who was fired after trying to use a forged document to kneecap President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, went straight into Fantasyland as he condemned the selection of Bari Weiss to oversee CBS News.

“The former opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times is not a reporter. She has never worked in television news and she has never led a staff larger than a few dozen,” Rather ranted on his substack. “That all changed this week when David Ellison, whose Skydance Media recently acquired CBS, installed Weiss in a position created for her. She will not report to the president of CBS News — as one might expect — but to David Ellison directly.” Rather finds it horrific that Weiss would even consider criticizing Democrats and Republicans with equal intensity, since everyone knows that Trump and the Republicans are evil. “While one must keep an open mind, it is hard to do so when such a statement portends a push for ‘bothsidesism’ and arguments reliant on false equivalences. There can be no equivalences drawn between the two political extremes in this country, especially when one extreme is led by a man who rarely speaks without lying.” Got it. “Bothsideism” is nothing but a deliberately pejorative term for “objectivity.” If you have decided that one side is always right and the other side is by definition wrong, you end up like Dan Rather, a biased, untrustworthy hack.

The rise of Weiss, whose crime in the eyes of the Woke is that she flagged the pernicious bias in the Axis news media and pronounced DEI the discriminatory blight that it is, “signals to everyone, especially to the man in the Oval Office, that CBS is no longer independent, but under the tutelage of a conservative billionaire who is putting more than his thumb on the scale.”

“No longer independent.” Would an independent news division seek to deceptively edit a high profile news interview with a Presidential candidate to make her appear better, rather than run with the scoop that its interview unmasked that candidate as an empty suit?

“Anything that runs afoul of Trump’s agenda may be flagged and is unlikely to be aired unaltered, if aired at all. No journalist or their work can remain unaffected by toiling in such an environment,” Rather said. Wow. He actually went the route of claiming altering a Trump answer would be unconscionable, as if CBS hadn’t defended its clean-up with Kamala.

“It is a dark day in the halls of CBS News, where the portraits of television news pioneers once hung — Cronkite, Murrow, Sevareid, Collingwood. They were journalists who made television a trusted source of information. Whom and what are we to believe today?” Rather asked. Well, not John Dickerson. Not Gayle King. Not Margaret Brennan.

Not Dan Rather.