Rather Biased?

Dan Rather's retiring and FAIR has looked into whether or not his career has been what the right-wing likes to think it has. Some of their findings:

"For right-wing media critics, Rather has long served as their 'liberal media' bogeyman, personifying the nightly news' supposed tendency to skewer Republicans and coddle Democrats.

...you can't find much evidence on his newscast to support their argument. A FAIR study of the network newscasts in 2001 found that Rather's CBS Evening News featured substantially more Republicans than Democrats (76 percent vs. 23 percent). The difference between CBS and the other networks was slim, but such analysis belies the notion that Rather's network-- or any of the others-- have a left-wing bias.

And coverage of the Iraq war was similarly skewed-- and not in favor of the left: During the first three weeks of combat, Rather's broadcast had the highest percentage of official U.S. sources (75 percent) and the lowest number (less than one percent) of U.S. anti-war voices. When Rather famously announced after the September 11 attacks that 'wherever [Bush] wants me to line up, just tell me where,' perhaps his most valuable service to Bush was the failure to pose difficult questions or feature dissenting perspectives on the Iraq war."