Dan Rather's Audience Now Even More Microscopic

The washed-up former CBS news hack, disgraced in 2004 for trying to influence the presidential election with the use of forged memos on 60 Minutes II, now has an even smaller platform as his obscure network has been yanked by Time Warner cable in New York.

TIME Warner Cable in New York is dropping Mark Cuban's HDNet channel at the end of the month, officials said yesterday.

The move will effect Time Warner systems across the country and cost Cuban's pioneering HD channel more than 1 million of its reported 15 million subscribers nationally.

The programming on the channel includes special investigative reports by former CBS anchorman Dan Rather, live concerts and wrestling. "But in a world with hundreds of channels, simply being HD isn't enough," said a spokeswoman.

HDNet will go off May 31, when its current contract expires, she said, and will be replaced by Smithsonian HD.

Perhaps Smithsonian HD channel can air programs about TV relics who refuse to go away gracefully.

Rather to Revisit 2000 Election

This is really pathetic.

Aging hack Dan Rather, having failed at influencing the 2004 election with Memogate, is now revisiting the 2000 election.

The left will just never get over it.

`Rather Reports' on Vote-Count Fiascos

NEW YORK (AP) - With the 2008 election season heating up, familiar scapegoats continue to take the hit for past hang-ups at the polls. Those include bad graphic design (Florida's confusing "butterfly ballot" in 2000) and software glitches in certain voting machines.

But this week's edition of "Dan Rather Reports" explores other culprits: the very paper from which punch-card ballots were made, and glaring shortcuts in how certain touch-screen voting machines were produced.

"Our story is not that the election would have turned out differently in 2000 if certain things hadn't happened. No one can know that," Rather said Monday. But his eight-month investigation has "dug down vertically as deep as we were capable of doing" to probe the brewing problems—including on-camera interviews with workers who had a front-row seat.

The hourlong news program premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. EDT on cable's HDNet channel, with subsequent re-airings and streaming online video.