Dan Rather hates us...

Gee, I wonder why? Courtesy of Newsmax...

Dan Rather: Beware of 'New Media'

Former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather on Tuesday delivered a pointed message to an audience of young people at the University of Maine.

"News is something people need to know which someone, somewhere, doesn’t want them to know,” Rather said. "All the rest is advertising.”

Speaking at the Maine Center for the Arts on the University of Maine campus, Rather called for a return to what he termed "independent journalism,” warning his listeners to cast a wary eye of the plethora of "new media" outlets that he said feign objectivity while working to advance their own - or another's - agenda, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Many of these students had never heard of Rather, according to the newspaper, because few of them watch evening news shows or read daily newspapers. A large portion of the audience receives its information from various Web sites and "non-traditional” news media.

Rather - who was driven from his anchor seat largely because bloggers and other "new media” outlets, such as NewsMax.com, exposed his use of forged documents last year to falsely attack President Bush of shirking National Guard duty - says that such media sources should be viewed critically.

"You need to ask yourself: Is more better, and is all that calls itself news really news?" said Rather, who turned 74 this week.

Rather praised the youthful audience as "more sophisticated because you have much more information coming in.” However, the former news anchor tempered the compliment immediately afterward.

"Your intelligence is not yet matched by the information that you need,” he said.

I love it, nothing is greater than making the old media tremble like this.