"Occasional candor from big-name journalists can be illuminating. Eight months after 9/11, in an interview with BBC television, Dan Rather said that American journalists were intimidated in the wake of the attacks. Making what he called “an obscene comparison,” the CBS news anchor ruminated: “There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be ‘necklaced’ here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.” Rather added that “I do not except myself from this criticism,” and he went on: “What we are talking about here—whether one wants to recognize it or not, or call it by its proper name or not—is a form of self-censorship. I worry that patriotism run amok will trample the very values that the country seeks to defend.”"
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Norman Solomon in Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You, p. 24 (2003)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dan_Rather
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Dan Rather
Daniel Irvin "Dan" Rather, Jr. (born October 31, 1931) is an American journalist. Rather began his career in Texas and as an early-career reporter was on the scene of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. His reporting elevated his position in CBS News, where he was White House correspondent beginning in 1964. He served as foreign correspondent in London and Vietnam over the next two years before returning to the White House correspondent position, covering the Nixon presidency, including the tri
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