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I would think a key difference is once this was found out, Dan Rather was fired.

There will always be failures of integrity. Our expectation can't be infallible people, but rather the rigor of an organization to care about the failures.

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I think its more a case of once other people found out it became untenable to keep Dan Rather on.

However if his lies had not become public they would have been happy to ignore it and move on to the next thing.

Who is "they"? You seem to be implying that CBS was aware of the deception but hid it until its hand was forced by bloggers. Was that the case? Because otherwise they obviously couldn't act on something they didn't know.

I think almost certainly their primary motivation was self-preservation. The media simply lies, fabricates, deflects, obsfucates, cherry picks too much to assume they are acting in good faith.

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