Dan Rather suffered a setback today when a judge threw out most of his lawsuit against CBS after his firing in the wake of the fraudulent documents used as the basis for a hit piece on President George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, too much of the media either (wrongly) assumes that everyone remembers what all the hubbub is about, or is participating in the whitewashing of history.

First, the papers that did it somewhat right -- even these reports don't call the documents what they were: forgeries.

The Los Angeles Times:

Rather sued his former employer in September, alleging that the network sought to use him as a scapegoat for a controversial story that claimed President Bush received preferential treatment during his Vietnam War-era service with the Texas Air National Guard. The piece, which Rather reported on the weekday edition of "60 Minutes," was found to be based on documents that could not be authenticated.

The New York Times:

The ruling enabled both sides to claim partial victories in a case that focuses on the fallout over a September 2004 report on the weeknight edition of “60 Minutes,” narrated by Mr. Rather, that raised questions about favoritism regarding President Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War.

CBS later said that it could not verify the documents on which the report had been based, and Mr. Rather was forced to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005, a year earlier than he had planned.

I think that the New York Times characterization of Rather as nothing more than a narrator isn't supported by the facts.

Now those who didn't do so good. First, disappointingly, is The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, who mentioned the judge's ruling in a longer piece about Katie Couric's imminent ouster from the chair Rather once held.

The period of upheaval began when CBS forced Dan Rather out of the anchor chair following the debacle over his 2004 report on President Bush's National Guard service. A New York state judge yesterday threw out four counts -- including charges of fraud -- in Rather's lawsuit against the network. Rather alleged that CBS had made him a "scapegoat" for the Guard story and had forced him to apologize. The remaining three counts turn on whether the network gave Rather sufficient work at "60 Minutes" after he lost the anchor job.

Here it's just a "debacle" over a report, no mention of unverifiable documents in the heat of a hotly contested campaign. This might be forgivable if the Post ran a sidebar to the Kurtz column on the story, but that apparently didn't happen.

Oh, and they wouldn't have done any better had they used the Associated Press story as their sidebar.

Rather's lawsuit stemmed from CBS's reaction after he narrated a "60 Minutes II" report in September 2004, two months before the election, which stated that Bush avoided military service in Vietnam by using his father's connections to get into the Texas National Guard.

Once in the National Guard, the report said, Bush shirked and failed to complete his duties.

No mention that the documents that were the basis for the report were frauds. In fact, the impression the AP story would leave on a reader who didn't know the history is that Rather's lawsuit claiming that "powerful interests" forced him out because he ran with a politically unpopular report is a strong one.

I'm not sure whether to ascribe this to incompetence or liberal bias -- sometimes they're indistinguishable when you look at the final product.