Less than two weeks after Dan Rather had to acknowledge having used forged documents in his story about Bush's National Guard service, he aired a segment by reporter Richard Schlesinger about a mother who feared her sons would be drafted

National Review, Oct 25, 2004

* Less than two weeks after Dan Rather had to acknowledge having used forged documents in his story about Bush's National Guard service, he aired a segment by reporter Richard Schlesinger about a mother who feared her sons would be drafted. (The Kerry campaign is suggesting a draft is imminent thanks to Bush's foreign policy; the Bush administration has repeatedly said, Not a chance.) The interviewee, Beverly Cocco, is not your average soccer mom.

Although neither Schlesinger nor Rather bothered to tell viewers, she is the head of the Pennsylvania chapter of the anti-Iraq-war group People Against the Draft. This lapse brings to mind a minor scandal of the recent past, also mentioned in our pages, involving the New York Times Magazine and one Amy Richards, who told the Times about her decision to selectively abort two of her triplets. Identified only as a freelance writer, Richards was in fact a veteran abortion-rights activist, as a simple Google search reveals and as the paper later admitted. The Times's omission, which received plenty of deserved criticism, may have been an honest mistake. At this point it's awfully hard to believe the same about Rather's.