You have fallen for Rather and Mapes' false version of events. I followed the story at the time. The "truth" was that these fine folks tried to throw an election using a badly-sourced story and some documents that are known to be false now and were known to be unreliable at the time. And they were caught, not by anyone "spewing misogyny and racism", but by a bunch of amateur bloggers tracking down the clues in real time. As CBS now says, it was maybe the biggest embarrassment in their history.
Read up on the story; wikipedia has a good treatment.