"Sarah Lee Pilley, who ran a restaurant in Colville, Washington where the CBS crew dined while filming The Wall Within, would not agree. The wife of a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who saw combat in Vietnam, Pilley, said she "got the distinct feeling that CBS had a story they had decided on before they left New York." After interviewing 87 Vietnam veterans, CBS chose the "four or five saddest cases to put on the film," Pilley said. "The factual part of it didn't seem to matter as long as they captured the high drama and emotion that these few individuals offered. We felt all along that CBS committed tremendous exploitation of some very sick individuals."
Why would Dan Rather do such a thing? Partly because the stories of deranged, trip-wire vets is much more dramatic than the true story: That most Vietnam veterans came home to live normal, productive, happy lives. Second, Rather apparently wanted the story of whacked-out Vietnam veterans to be true — just as he now wants the Jerry Killian story to be true.

Or maybe — despite a preponderance of the evidence — he considered the sources of these tales of Vietnam atrocities "unimpeachable." As angry Vietnam veterans began calling CBS to complain about the factual inaccuracies of The Wall Within, Perry Wolff, the executive producer who wrote the documentary, claimed that "No one has attacked us on the facts." Despite the growing evidence that he'd been had, Rather also continued to defend the documentary — which is now part of CBS's video history series on the Vietnam War. "

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/morse200409150552.asp

Can you truely measure the amount damage Rather and people like him do?
The bright side is to think of how much improvement is possible in the human condition. Just think, all we have to do is to somehow select better reporters. It's like the Steve Job's thing of taking seconds off the start up time of computer- the "millions of lives saved" thing.
There is apparently a huge, huge amount of improvement possible with merely selecting honest and hard working reporters.

It's really exciting when you think of what a simple thing like blogging will do to change this. Now, I think of myself as optimistic, but getting rid of this molopoly on information and the coruption of power which completely warps these reporters, well, the stars are no limit. And this is not only merely possible in some distant future but is happenning right now. I simply will need to re-caliberate my view of the future- or my lack of optimism is going to cause me to be completely shocked by the coming transformation of this world.