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It was twenty years ago this week (November 23, 2004) that CBS News announced Dan Rather would be leaving as anchor of the CBS Evening News after 23 years at the helm of a once top-rated newscast that had tumbled to third place during his tenure.

CBS’s announcement came amid an investigation into his pre-election 60 Minutes attack piece about Republican President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. The story relied on modern-looking documents presented by Rather as 1970s memos created on a typewriter. CBS’s investigation into the scandal, released January 10, 2005, found “fundamental deficiencies in reporting,” but stopped short of finding a political bias against Bush.

Yet anyone watching Rather over the years couldn’t help but notice how he relentlessly twisted the news to help Democrats and liberals, while punishing Republicans and conservatives. In an era when news bias was more subtle than today’s in-your-face cable clamor, Rather’s awkwardly obvious partisanship stuck out like a sore thumb.

Rather once told CBS Evening News viewers that the Republican agenda was “to demolish or damage government aid programs…[for] children and the poor.” He advanced the desperate notion that the late ’90s impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice was “a kind of effort at a, quote, ‘coup.’”

He fawned over Democrats. “If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton,” he told Bill Clinton in 1993, “we’d take it right now and walk away winners.” In 2001, he insisted to FNC host Bill O’Reilly that Bill Clinton was “an honest man” because “you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”

He stubbornly refused to acknowledge his bias. “Anybody who knows me know that I not politically motivated,” he told USA Today in the midst of the phony documents scandal.

After finally leaving CBS News in 2006, Rather continued to push his views onto the public, including on social media. CNN and MSNBC often invited him on as a guest, attempting to recast him as a iconic journalist, rather than as a disgrace to the profession. In his 80s, Rather didn’t even try to sound even-handed. “People say, ‘Well, I’m not sure President Trump is racist.’ But racist is as racist does,” he baldly asserted on CNN in 2019.

Rather’s decades of biased reporting did much to hurt the media’s reputation for fairness, and he taught at least two generations of journalists how to spin the news to advance a liberal agenda. Here, from the MRC’s archives, are just some of quotes that show how Rather persistently pushed the Democratic Party line from the 1980s into the 2020s:

■ “You and the President were being party to sending missiles to the Ayatollah of Iran. Can you explain how — you were supposed to be the — you are — you’re an anti-terrorist expert! Iran was officially a terrorist state….The question is — but — you made us hypocrites in the face of the world!…How could you sign on to such a policy?!”
— During a live interview with Vice President George H.W Bush on the CBS Evening News, January 25, 1988.

■ “If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we’d take it right now and walk away winners….Tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we’re pulling for her.”
— To President Bill Clinton, via satellite, at a May 27, 1993 CBS affiliates meeting, referencing his new CBS Evening News co-anchor Connie Chung.

■ “I hear you talking and, as I have before on this subject, I don’t know of anybody, friend or foe, who isn’t impressed by your grasp of the details of this [health care] plan. I’m not surprised, because you have been working on it so long and listened to so many people.”
— Interview with Hillary Clinton, 48 Hours, September 22, 1993.

■ “It is not just Congress that is taking a sharp turn to the right. The surge to the right on Capitol Hill is making waves all over the country on openly politically partisan, and sometimes racist, radio.”
— CBS Evening News, January 4, 1995.

■ “There was no doubt Republicans in the House had enough votes tonight to pass another key item in their agenda to rip up or re-write government programs going back to the Franklin Roosevelt era. It is a bill making it harder, much harder, to protect health, safety, and the environment.”
— CBS Evening News, February 28, 1995.

■ “The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.”
— Leading off the March 16, 1995 Evening News.

■ “I’m all news, all the time. Full power, tall tower. I want to break in when news breaks out. That’s my agenda. Now, respectfully, when you start talking about a liberal agenda and all the, quote, ‘liberal bias’ in the media, I quite frankly, and I say this respectfully but candidly to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
— To Denver radio host Mike Rosen, November 28, 1995.

■ “Republicans kill the bill to clean up sleazy political fundraising. The business of dirty campaign money will stay business as usual.”
— CBS Evening News, February 26, 1998.

■ “Is or is there not some concern of the public perception, in some quarters, not all of them Democratic, that this is, in fact, a kind of effort at a, quote, ‘coup,’ that is you have a twice elected, popularly elected President of the United States, and so those that you mention in the Republican Party who dislike him and what he stands for, having been unable to beat him at the polls, have found another way to get him out of office?”
— Interviewing former GOP Senator Warren Rudman during CBS’s live coverage of the start of President Clinton’s impeachment trial, January 7, 1999.

■ “Once a political lightning rod, today she [Hillary Clinton] is political lightning. A crowd pleaser and first-class fundraiser, a person under enormous pressure to step into the arena, this time on her own.”
— Profiling Hillary Clinton on 60 Minutes II, May 26, 1999.

■ “While Fidel Castro, and certainly justified on his record, is widely criticized for a lot of things, there is no question that Castro feels a very deep and abiding connection to those Cubans who are still in Cuba and, I recognize this might be controversial, but there’s little doubt in my mind that Fidel Castro was sincere when he said, ‘Listen, we really want this child back here.’”
— During live coverage of the Elian raid, April 22, 2000.

■ “Nineteen days after the presidential election, Florida’s Republican Secretary of State is about to announce the winner — as she sees it and she decrees it — of the state’s potentially decisive 25 electoral votes. Katherine Harris will officially certify the state’s election returns….The believed certification — as the Republican Secretary of State sees it — is coming just hours after a court ordered deadline…. The certification —  as the Florida Secretary of State sees it and decrees it — is being signed.”
— During CBS News live coverage, November 26, 2000.

■ “Good evening. Texas Governor George Bush tonight will assume the mantle and the honor of President-elect. This comes 24 hours after a sharply split and, some say, politically and ideologically motivated U.S. Supreme Court ended Vice President Gore’s contest of the Florida election and, in effect, handed the presidency to Bush.”
— Beginning the December 13, 2000 CBS Evening News.     

■ “President Bush tonight outlines his cut-federal-programs-to-get-a-tax-cut plan to Congress and the nation.”
— CBS Evening News, February 27, 2001.

■ Bill O’Reilly: “I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?”
Dan Rather: “Yes, I think he’s an honest man.”
O’Reilly: “Do you, really?…Even though he lied to [PBS anchor] Jim Lehrer’s face about the Lewinsky case?”
Rather: “Who among us has not lied about something?”     
O’Reilly: “Well, I didn’t lie to anybody’s face on national television. I don’t think you have, have you?”
Rather: “I don’t think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it’s one thing – “
O’Reilly: “How can you say he’s an honest guy then?”
Rather: “Well, because I think he is. I think at core he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
— Exchange on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001.

■ “Today, on the Internet and elsewhere, some people, including many who are partisan political operatives, concentrated not on the key questions of the overall story, but on the documents that were part of the support of the story. They allege that the documents are fake….The 60 Minutes report was based not solely on the recovered documents, but on a preponderance of the evidence, including documents that were provided by what we consider to be solid sources….If any definitive evidence to the contrary of our story is found, we will report it. So far, there is none.”
— CBS Evening News, September 10, 2004, two days after his 60 Minutes reporting alleging President George W. Bush failed to fulfill his National Guard service.

■ “Anybody who knows me knows that I am not politically motivated, not politically active for Democrats or Republicans, and that I’m independent. People who are so passionately partisan politically or ideologically committed basically say, ‘Because he won’t report it our way, we’re going to hang something bad around his neck and choke him with it, check him out of existence if we can, if not make him feel great pain.’ They know that I’m fiercely independent and that’s what drives them up a wall.”
— Rather quoted in USA Today, September 17, 2004.

■ “One way a reporter in this country should be judged is how well he or she stands up to the pressure to intimidate. I remember the first time someone accused me of being an ‘N-lover.’ There was a lot of that during the ’60s when I covered the civil rights movement….Then, when Watergate came into being….was the first time I began to hear this word ‘liberal’ as an epithet thrown my way….People who have very strong biases of their own, they come at you with a story: ‘If you won’t report it the way I want it reported, then you’re biased.’”
— Near the end of his one-hour CBS News special, Dan Rather: A Reporter Remembers, which aired on his last night as CBS Evening News anchor, March 9, 2005.

■ “I know that it’s widely believed that CBS, NBC, ABC chock full of liberals. Not true. What it’s chock full of is people who wanted to give honest news, straightforward news, and voted both ways in many elections.”
— Appearing on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, May 30, 2012.

■ “The central thing to keep in mind is his [President Obama’s] opponents — you talk about taking them out to dinner, making nice with them — these people, politically, want to cut his heart out and throw his liver to the dogs.”
— On The Chris Matthews Show, May 5, 2013.

■ “To call Trump a con man, as many have, is a disservice to the art of the con. By its definition a con requires deceit. But Trump has not tried to hide his lies or the sheer unrealistic audacity of his cartoonish policy positions.”
— In a post-debate Facebook post, September 27, 2016.

■ “We haven’t had a president this psychologically troubled — I’m trying to use my language real carefully — we haven’t had a president this psychologically troubled in this way since at least Richard Nixon.”
— Talking about President Trump on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, June 1, 2017.

■ “Look many things about the age of Trump will make the stomach sicker than bad oysters.”
— On TBS’s Conan, December 4, 2017.

■ “People say, ‘well, I’m not sure President Trump is racist.’ But racist is as racist does.”
— On CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, August 5, 2019.

■ “What this presidential election is about is whether the country’s going to move more in the direction of white supremacy, or whether it’s going to move more in the direction of a multiracial, constitutional republic based on the principles of freedom and democracy.”
— On MSNBC’s AM Joy, September 13, 2020.

For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.