Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From "Exclusive: Rachel Maddow Gives Her First Interview as She Steps Back From the Nightly Grind and Revs Up for Her Next Act" by Joe Pompeo, Vanity Fair, 2022-08-07:

It was three months after our ice fishing trip, and I was back in Western Mass, this time sitting with Maddow on her screened-in porch, eating sandwiches on a rainy spring day. [...] We also got into a back-and-forth about her dossier segments. "Trying to turn the Russia scandal into the dossier, or trying to turn the dossier into the Russia scandal, is a revisionist history designed to intimidate people out of covering stories like that in the future," she said, "and to try to obscure the seriousness of what Russia did, and what the Trump campaign's relationship was with what Russia did."

I suggested that Maddow's coverage may have given viewers a false sense of hope that Trump was about to get taken down, not unlike how, say, viewers of Newsmax may have been led to believe that the 2020 election was about to be overturned. At this point in our conversation, Maddow did something very Maddow, reaching back into the past to make a point about the present.

"Do you remember what the Dan Rather scandal was about?" she said, referring to a 2004 controversy in which the legendary newsman's career came to a screeching halt over a 60 Minutes segment based on allegedly forged documents that CBS News failed to authenticate. "There was a document that was involved. He was reporting on, like, how did George W. Bush avoid going to Vietnam? How was his National Guard service arranged? Why did he get this coveted spot in this group that wasn't gonna be fighting? The story of George W. Bush getting a sweet gig in the National Guard so he didn't have to go fight in Vietnam was true. Somebody giving Dan Rather a forged document, so he had a screwed-up news story about it, is fascinating, and it's an interesting thing about CBS News. But it doesn't mean that the National Guard thing about George W. Bush was not true! It just-it neutralized it. Like it made that go away. And the whole thing became a Dan Rather scandal. That's what's going on with the dossier."