I was looking for the transcript of Bill Moyers’s speech. I found Dan Rather’s from the same conference. It starts promisingly: “And when you hear me criticize and critique the press, please know that I do not exempt myself from these criticisms.”

Well, let’s see if he delivers the goods:

I only found out years after the fact, for example, about the pressure that the Nixon White House put on my then-bosses, during Watergate — pressure to cut down my pieces, to call me off the story, and so on… because, back then, my bosses took the heat, so I didn’t have to.

Whoa. With the allegations from Jessica Yellin and Katie Couric about news execs pressuring reporters, perhaps Rather could shed some light on his personal experience in the last decade? He can’t even name names of whom those executives were? Not even a comment that he couldn’t comment because of the (self-serving) lawsuit he filed against CBS and Viacom? There’s nothing in this talk even remotely approaching a mea culpa like this: “Well, as you know, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, and I watched the tapes of myself during those 6 months leading to war.” Nothing to say whether he had come across Landay and Strobel in that time.

Whatever. Journalism’s Bg Feet have a right to mail in their speeches. But nobody notices this; nobody wants to crack the unified front of media criticism. Greg Mitchell, writing in E&P, stenographs it in.