You're both being silly and showing your incredible bias. Lying is willfully passing off something as true that isn't. Your definitions don't even pass the giggle test. He shoulda done more research for sure, and he did/does have an axe to grind, but he wasn't that far from the truth even when he did admit Burkett wasn't on the up-and-up with him. Even Bush's ex commander's secretary said the guts of the information was true. What matters more, the truth or how it is told?
On September 8, 2004, Rather reported on 60 Minutes Wednesday that a series of documents concerning President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service record had been discovered in the personal files of Lt. Bush's former commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, in which Bush was found unfit for flight status after failing to obey an order to submit to a physical examination. The authenticity of these documents was quickly called into question by both conservative and liberal bloggers; by September 10, stories in media outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Chicago Sun-Times examined the documents' authenticity. Rather and CBS vigorously defended the story, insisting that the documents had been authenticated by experts. However, CBS was contradicted by some of the experts it originally cited, and later reported that their source for the documents, former Texas Army National Guard officer Bill Burkett, had misled the network about how he had obtained them. Rather held a one-on-one interview with Killian's personal secretary who vouched for the contents of the documents although she did not authenticate the documents in question themselves, which suggested that the documents were recreations of originals made from poor reproductions or from memory.[3] On September 20, CBS retracted the story. Rather stated, "if I knew then what I know now, I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question."[4] The controversy has been referred to by some as "Memogate" and "Rathergate." Following an independent investigation commissioned by CBS, CBS fired story producer Mary Mapes and asked three other producers connected with the story to resign. Rather's retirement was directly hastened by this incident, and many believe that he would otherwise have stepped down in March 2006, 25 years after beginning as anchor.[citation needed] The Burkett documents are popularly believed to be forgeries created by making hazy photocopies of computer-generated documents crafted using Microsoft Word's default font settings, but no one has ever proved them to be so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#Killian_documents
