I'm sure all of you recall Dan Rather's National Guard documents fiasco. After the documents were shown to have been falsified, Rather was vilified in the media and stepped down from his anchor seat at CBS news.

Now, Rather is suing CBS and some of the claims illustrate what an enormous lie it has always been to claim the mainstream media is liberal.

Rather contends not only that his report was true - "What the documents stated has never been denied, by the president or anyone around him," he says - but that CBS succumbed to political pressure from conservatives to get the report discredited and to have him fired. He also claims that a panel set up by CBS to investigate the story was packed with conservatives in an effort to placate the White House. Part of the reason for that, he suggests, was that Viacom, a sister company of CBS, knew that it would have important broadcasting regulatory issues to deal with during Bush's second term.

Among those CBS considered for the panel to investigate Rather's report were far-right broadcasters Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

"CBS broke with long-standing tradition at CBS News and elsewhere of standing up to political pressure," says Rather. "And, there's no joy in saying it, they caved ... in an effort to placate their regulators in Washington."

CBS wanted to hire Limbaugh and Coulter to investigate the report. Yeah...big ole liberals, those guys.

But it wasn't just the investigation. Rather contends that the network actively attempted to stop him from reporting on news that would put the Bush administration in a bad light.

Rather's lawsuit makes other serious allegations about CBS succumbing to political pressure in an attempt to suppress important news stories. In particular, he says that his bosses at CBS tried to stop him reporting evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. According to Rather's lawsuit, "for weeks they refused to grant permission to air the story" and "continued to raise the goalposts, insisting on additional substantiation". Rather also claims that General Richard Meyers, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military official in the US, called him at home and asked him not to broadcast the story, saying that it would "endanger national security".

Rather says that CBS only agreed to allow him to broadcast the story when it found out that Seymour Hersh would be writing about it in the New Yorker magazine. Even then, Rather claims, CBS tried to bury it. "CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be referenced on the CBS Evening News," he says.

Trust me. No liberal news agency would avoid reporting on the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. No liberal news agency would so actively kowtow to the will of the Bush administration.

But then again, it was this same "liberal" media that was exceptionally favorable to John McCain during his presidential election campaign. The "liberal" media that didn't go after McCain for his friendship with G. Gordon Liddy, but tagged Obama and again and again about William Ayers (not that I have affection for Ayers, because I don't) and virtually ignored McCain's involvement in the Keating Five.

But the media is just so gosh darn liberal, right?