CBS boycott effort heats up after e-mail

Dan Rather and the mystery documents have been water-cooler chatter for just about everyone. But talking about it wasn't enough for Jeff Clarke.

Clarke, a Tampa businessman, says he thought Rather should be fired after the revelation that a Sept.8 60 Minutes report on gaps in President Bush's military service records had been based in part on documents that appear to have been forged.

So Clarke started e-mailing national sponsors of the network. He says he didn't plan to start a boycott effort, but "I copied about 20 people, and I got about 16 responses overnight. They all said, "We want to be in on this."'

Clarke and a group of about 50 of his friends also started e-mailing local sponsors of WTSP-Ch. 10, the Tampa Bay area CBS affiliate.

"I copied the station manager about what we were doing," Clarke says.

He wasn't the only one e-mailing Sam Rosenwasser, general manager at WTSP, about Rather. Because of the efforts of the Rathergate.com group, Rosenwasser and other CBS affiliate managers nationwide were getting "hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, most of them not even from people in our viewing area," Rosenwasser says.

He responded to Clarke's e-mail, saying that he and WTSP had "no authority" over decisions by CBS and that the boycott of local sponsors "only affects people at our station."

Clarke responded. To this point the exchange was civil. Then Clarke got a copy of an e-mail Rosenwasser wrote to a staff attorney at Gannett Corp., which owns WTSP.

Rosenwasser wrote that Clarke "wants Dan Rather off our air or he will contact our advertisers. This sounds like extortion to me. Is there anything we can do legally. ...?"

Clarke was incensed. "I was offended that he would try to intimidate us." He fired off an angry e-mail. Rosenwasser asked Clarke to call him. But Clarke didn't; instead, he forwarded the whole exchange to the St. Petersburg Times.

Rosenwasser says he never meant to copy the memo to Clarke. "It was by accident. Instead of hitting forward, I hit reply. I wish he had called me. That's what I would have told him." He says no legal action is planned.

Clarke says, "His intent was still to take legal action against us." But he credits Rosenwasser with responding personally. One of the local sponsors his group e-mailed responded with anonymous phone calls "calling us a bunch of fools."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

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