CBS "Panel" Report a Whitewash

[Overpaid Slacker]

Mapes is going around, for all intents and purposes claiming she was a scapegoat, and stating that there was no finding of political bias, which is good because, in her words, she "has no political bias."

Yeah. As a survey, check out Jonathan Last's Weekly Standard piece, and then for those of you that don't immediately vomit at the mention of his name, check Hugh Hewitt.

But, just as a little primer, here's Podhoretz' piece about the Panel claiming it "cannot conclude" there was a political agenda involved. Personally, I think the choice of the terms "cannot conclude" to be a bit too coy .... I can think of a bunch of reasons why, faced with copious and serious evidence of political bias that they "cannot" conclude that there was (as opposed to affirmatively concluding that there wasn't, for example). Ususally I read this type of primary source document, but I think I'll skip this one, as it was an unserious effort with a deliberately thin result.

Anyway, herewith, Mr. Podhoretz:

THE most astonishing passage in the bombshell 234-page report on CBS News' disgraceful fabricated memos story about George W. Bush's long-ago military service is its weakest passage.

It comes when the report's two authors (who call themselves The Panel) decide they're going to cover CBS's backside against the transparent partisan and ideological bias evident in the story they go to great lengths to discredit.

"The Panel is aware that some have ascribed political motivations to [the decision by] '60 Minutes Wednesday' . . . to air the Sept. 8 segment just two months before the presidential election, while others further found political bias in the program itself," they write. "The Panel reviewed this issue and found certain actions that could support such charges. However, the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at '60 Minutes Wednesday' drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content."

This is one of the few disingenuous moments in the otherwise impeccable report by The Panel, a.k.a. former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press honcho Louis Boccardi. In its incredibly rich detail, their report makes the open-and-shut case that the faked-documents story was designed and intended to sway the results of the 2004 election - and that it was rushed to air to achieve precisely this aim.

The information that follows here comes entirely from the report itself. The report focuses on Mary Mapes, the producer of the Sept. 8 broadcast.

It reveals that Mapes spent five years, on and off, trying to prove that George W. Bush's National Guard service was ignoble. She began in 1999, telling her boss Dan Rather in a memo that "in his military career, [Bush] was truly born on third base." She also accused him of having found "a safe haven for children of Privilege" in the Texas Air National Guard because the future president got a coveted spot despite a long waiting list.

But a problem arose with Mapes' theory: There is strong evidence, according to the report, that there was no waiting list. The Panel knows about that because Mapes knew about it - it was in her files. But still she chose to cling to the idea of finding a smoking gun in Bush's past.

Flash forward to 2004. The Panel informs us that by the summer of last year, Mapes was determined to do a big story on Bush's service to be aired in the fall only weeks before the general election. The problem: There was no story. "Mapes and her team were not focused on any particular event or topic between June and late August, but instead . . . were trying to identify a viable story line regarding the president's military service."

Let's translate this passage. Mapes was not "focused on any particular event or topic." In other words, she had nothing to go on. And yet on she went, searching for a "viable story line."

Mapes was on a gigantic fishing expedition. She was trying to bag a president. She did so with the consent and support of her superiors.

With that aim in mind, she partnered up with one Michael Smith, a Texas journalist. Smith told her he had a "tasty brisket of information" to share with her about Bush, and basically he wanted to be hired.

Mapes e-mailed Smith in July, using capital letters with great urgency: "I am DEADLY serious about it. I have two other people working with me, looking at various aspects of the story, trying to find an opening . . . The piece (if I get it) will run in early September. I need all the help I can get. Just tell me what you've got."

And she offered him more capital letters later in the month: "I desperately want to talk to you. . . . Do NOT underestimate how much I want this story."

Where did Smith and Mapes find the supposedly incriminating documents supposedly written by Bush's superior officer - a man conveniently dead for 20 years? Through a Web site called onlinejournal.com, edited by a man named Paul Lukasiak.

Ideologically, Paul Lukasiak makes Michael Moore seem like William F. Buckley Jr.

Lukasiak put them in touch with Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, who was coy and cagey with them about the smoking-gun documents he possesses.

In order to dislodge those documents, Smith e-mailed Mapes with a plan of seduction: Maybe they could get Burkett's complete cooperation by getting him an agent and a book deal, so he could get some money out of the whole thing?

Smith's e-mail gave the game away. He told Mapes he was going to contact an "editor friend" to ask the following:

"What if there was a person who might have some information that could possibly change the momentum of an election but we needed to get an ASAP book deal to help get us the information?"

There it is, the phrase that pays: "information that could possibly change the momentum of an election."

Smith's e-mail proves that, more than a week before the story aired, two of its producers were openly discussing how their story could tilt the election to John Kerry.

We know Mapes liked the sound of it because she e-mailed back: "That looks good, hypothetically speaking, of course." In the end, the story's producers did not broker a book deal. But they did bring their source into contact with a highranking official in the, you guessed it, Kerry campaign.

We knew about this before. What we didn't know was that Mapes got the phone number she needed through her own husband.

Mapes wanted the story on the air. She wanted it desperately. The authors of the report say she was bewitched by competitive pressures (because other news organizations were on the story, too). They show that she displayed astonishingly poor judgment - and, in the aftermath of the story's airing, just kept lying through her teeth both to her superiors and to the report's authors.

But here's the thing. It doesn't matter whether CBS executives met in a room, twirled moustaches and gave each other high-fives about getting George Bush. What matters is that they turned their airwaves over to someone who was clearly in the grip of an obsession.

And here's the other thing. They were able to do such a thing because they did not see her obsession as an obsession - because, no doubt, most of them wanted it to be true, too.

That's what happens when you're blinded by bias. Thornburgh and Boccardi didn't want to say so. The world doesn't need them to say so. The world knows the truth.

[Overpaid Slacker]

I know most of you don't care -- which, actually, is great; probably having concluded that the dox in question were fake, CBS would never own up to it and just moved on.

However, in the interest of a repository of info for the few who do care (who've PM'd me on other matters asking for more info/proof/sources/backstory on topics I've posted), I'm adding the following to this -- very thin -- thread.

Thanks in advance for your indulgence.

Jonathan Last -- "It's Worse Than You Thought", Weekly Standard

THE THORNBURGH-BOCCARDI PANEL makes a great show of its agnosticism about the question at the heart of the CBS scandal: Are the memos CBS presented authentic? On this score, the CBS Report is certain in its uncertainty: "The Panel was not able to reach a definitive conclusion as to the authenticity of the Killian documents."

This statement was surely news-worthy. Before Monday, the forgery of the documents had been settled. Settled, that is, by a large cohort of experts, a bevy of testimony from the blogosphere, and, most definitively, by Dr. Joseph Newcomer.

On September 12, 2004, Newcomer, one of the fathers of modern electronic typesetting, published a 7,000 word essay about the fraudulent documents used by CBS. Newcomer's conclusion was simple and unequivocal. "These documents," he said after much explanation, "are modern forgeries." So why did the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel turn their back on Newcomer and the rest of the body of expert opinion? What caused them to suspect that the documents might indeed be authentic?

APPENDIX 4 of the CBS Report details the panel's lone inquiry into the technical aspects of the questionable memos using the services of Peter Tytell. The report gives nearly a full page of Tytell's impressive qualifications, the most charming of which is that he was once referred to as a "famous typewriter detective" by CBS's own Andy Rooney.

Like Newcomer, Tytell came to some quick conclusions. He said that even while watching the September 10 CBS Evening News broadcast at home, he knew "within 5 seconds" that something was wrong with the new 1972 Killian documents CBS was showcasing.

Now, after careful examination, Tytell has come to three conclusions:

(1) The previously-released Texas Air National Guard documents had been created on an "Olympia manual typewriter."

(2) The four disputed Killian memos "were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter."

(3) "The Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle."

Why is Tytell so sure? The Killian memos had proportional spacing, a superscript "th" key, and a serif typestyle. Tytell consulted the Haas Atlas--the typesetters bible--and "did not find a single match with the Killian documents."

There was some question about whether or not an IBM Selectric could have produced a match. Tytell is thorough on this matter. What would it have taken to make an IBM Selectric Composer capable of creating the Killian memos?

* Remember that we know that at least some TexANG offices were using Olympia manual typewriters.

* During the early 1970s, Tytell told the panel "a typical TexANG office was unlikely to have had an IBM Selectric Composer" because "the machines were very expensive, difficult to use and designed primarily for the commercial production of books, newspapers and other printed material."

* The TexANG office would have had to weld both a superscript "th" and a "#" key to the machine, a process Tytell calls "highly inconvenient."


Yet even if you would be willing to allow for all of these mounting improbabilities, the typestyle from the Selectric Composer still would not have matched exactly. The two typestyles were "very close," but there were "notable differences." Tytell tells the panel that he did "not believe that any manual or electric typewriter of the early 1970s could have produced the typeface used in the Killian documents." Which leads him to this haymaker:

. . . the documents appear to have been produced in Times New Roman typestyle. . . . Times New Roman was only available on typesetting and other non-tabletop machines until the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980s. Therefore [Tytell] concluded that Times New Roman could not have been available on a typewriter in the early 1970s and the Killian documents must have been produced on a computer. [emphasis added]

Which brings us back to Joseph Newcomer. After all of his examinations, Peter Tytell had reached exactly the same conclusion as Newcomer. And, like Newcomer, Tytell's judgment to the panel could not have been more forthright. The panel reports, "Tytell concluded that the Killian documents were generated on a computer."

So how did Thornburgh and Boccardi manage to walk away from their own expert's decisive verdict? The answer is hidden in footnote 16 on page 7 of Appendix 4:

Although his reasoning seems credible and persuasive, the Panel does not know for certain whether Tytell has accounted for all alternative typestyles that might have been available on typewriters during that era.

Leave aside the "no political bias" finding; leave aside the kid-glove treatment of Dan Rather and Andrew Heyward. This abdication of responsibility by the panel in the face of their own expert's conclusions is so startling that it legitimately calls into question--by itself--everything else in the report

[pwd72s]

Did you listen to Rush today? (1-12) Some not so amazing connections on this so-called "independent panel". One of the lawyers on it belonging to a firm used by See-BS. Bottom line: From 5 to 8 PM, my TV stays off. I believe nothing I see on that box, so sometimes I turn it on only when what they call "entertainment" is on. The ball game results, I believe to be true. Only because those results don't really matter to the networks. They matter, of course, if you are a bookie or a gambler.

[cegerer]

Here's a nice little video compilation. Note the inflections in Dannyboy's voice when he gleefully reports the discovery of the documents ......


http://www.newsfly.org/media/cbsremix.htm

http://www.boycottcbs.com/

[350HP930]

Originally posted by pwd72s
Did you listen to Rush today?

You had might as well be asking 'do you enjoy eating your boogers?' but I guess there are a few people who would say yes to either question.
'

[Overpaid Slacker]

Likening the CBS "Report" to other recent cover-ups, Hugh Hewitt offers this:

LARGE AND POWERFUL INSTITUTIONS do not react well to internal scandal, especially when that scandal threatens to erode a central pillar of the institution's authority. The first reaction will almost inevitably be denial, followed by various efforts to isolate and minimize the scandal, to protect leadership, and then to adopt only such "reforms" as are forced upon it. Genuine accountability and reform typically only accompany a crash so spectacular that no one can persist in the cover-up.

Thus did the Roman Catholic Church in America deal with the sexual abuse scandal which developed over 30 years and broke with such fury in recent times. The capitulation of Bernard Francis Cardinal Law was the result of a years-long erosion of his and his Diocese's credibility which was prolonged and embarrassing and which was accompanied by a series of half-measures and stalls that in retrospect defy understanding. There are even now still some corners of the American Church, like the Diocese of Los Angeles, that continue to resist accountability, even while neighboring bishops, like the Bishop of Orange County California sign off on $100 million plus settlements.

A similar pattern of denial followed by painful reform is unfolding at the oil-for-food-for-dictators scandal plagued United Nations, within a CIA that failed to see 9/11 coming and which has yet to account for the missing WMD in Iraq, and even within Major League Baseball as it struggles to persuade the fans that every homerun record of recent years shouldn't have a steroid-induced asterisk next to it. In each case, a large and powerful institution fought, through various ruses and tricks, to preserve a crucial reputation. For the Church, it was the character of the priesthood. For the United Nations, it is the claim to high-minded purpose. For the CIA, it is the agency's over-the-horizon powers of anticipation and analysis. And for baseball, the myth of the athlete-champion.

Each of these institutions tried to hang on to their internal sense of identity. Why should we expect anything less of CBS?


THE PARALLELS between the Church's behaviors and those of CBS are particularly striking. For years complaints about predator priests, like complaints about political bias in the newsroom, were swept aside with disbelief or sneers. When particular facts gave rise to unavoidable conclusion of corruption, the offending priest was sent away to a distant parish or rehab. Any comprehensive attempt to warn leadership, like Father Thomas Doyle's 1985 report on the abuse problem to the Bishops or Bernard Goldberg's polemic Bias, were buried or ignored. The astonishing details of indifference to the scandal by Church authorities can be found in David France's Our Fathers. The go-to book on CBS's collapse of credibility has yet to be written, though my new book Blog provides a concise summary of the Rathergate specifics.

There is a temptation among many CBS observers to see the just released internal investigation led by Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi as a full accounting and a sort of conclusion to the Rathergate scandal of last fall. Certainly CBS President Les Moonves treated the report that way, seizing especially on what he saw as the panel's exoneration of CBS News of the charge of political bias. Dan Rather, like Bernard Law, is being sent off to a tarnished semi-retirement, and the other cardinals and bishops of big media at least seem ready to put a bow on it.

The Law/Rather analogy is a misleading application of a meaningful comparison. At the end, Law was a disgraced, nearly broken and by most accounts genuinely contrite figure. His Diocese was obliged to wholesale beautiful properties, and a full and grindingly embarrassing opening of files has occurred.

Nothing like this has happened at CBS. In fact, just the opposite. The friends of CBS, like the friends of Law in the early years of the sexual abuse scandals, are chiding critics of the network as extremists or fanatics. These apologists are citing the Thornburgh-Boccardi report as "detailed," "exhaustive," and "comprehensive." It is, of course, nothing of the sort. It is, in fact, a whitewash that can be summed up this way: "Blah, blah, blah, blah. We cannot conclude there is a political agenda at CBS and we cannot conclude that the documents are forgeries. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah."

Ask yourself what you know this week that you didn't know seven days ago? That Mary Mapes has been fired as opposed to would be fired? That she was an obsessed and fanatical Bush-hater? That the story was rushed to air?

We knew all of these things, and we know nothing new of significance post-report. We don't know who Lucy Ramirez is. We don't know the extent of the Kerry campaign coordination with Mapes and her team. We don't know who cooked up the scheme to use forgeries in an attempt to influence a presidential election. We don't know how many more Mary Mapeses are embedded within CBS. We don't even know if Dan Rather uses email or a blackberry. There has been no release of original documents, and no comprehensive release of transcripts of the panel's interviews with leading figures in the scandal.

The internal report resembles nothing so much as the various maneuvers adopted by the Diocese of Boston to do anything but admit the extent and depth of its scandal throughout the '80s and the '90s. It is a stonewall, and a clever one, designed as it is to appear comprehensive by virtue of length and footnotes, and signed off on by a former United States attorney general. A bit of genius, as well, to limit "The Panel" to a membership of two. Not much of a chance of an inconvenient dissenting opinion when the club is that small.

Patrick Ruffini and Jim Geraghty, among others, have worried that bloggers unsatisfied with the CBS whitewash run the risk of appearing extreme, even Javert-like. The trouble is that the central issue--agenda journalism as practiced by stark partisans operating within Big Media--has not only been sidestepped by the panel, it has been denied by Les Moonves. The key question is how many more Mapeses there are, how many more "Lucy Ramirezes" will surface in the out years, and how many more partisan attacks dressed up as reporting will be seen in future election cycles.

The folks eager to grant absolution to CBS, or to at least walk away from what they see as the train wreck, should read France's book. Of course the injury done to innocent victims of sexual assault cannot be compared to the costs of agenda journalism to the public's expectation of objective reporting; but a cover-up is a cover-up.

[Overpaid Slacker]

Ann Coulter:


If CNN doesn't hire them, Dan Rather and his producers can always get a job teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism. The Columbia Journalism Review recently defended the CBS report on George Bush using forged National Guard documents with the Tawana Brawley excuse: The documents might be "fake but accurate."

Dan Rather and his crack investigative producer Mary Mapes are still not admitting the documents were fakes. Of course, Dan Rather is still not admitting Kerry lost the election or that a woman named Juanita Broaddrick credibly accused Bill Clinton of rape.

Responding to Bill O'Reilly's question in a May 15, 2001, interview on "The O'Reilly Factor" about why CBS News had mentioned crackpot rumors of George Bush's drug use on air seven times, but the name "Juanita Broaddrick" had never crossed Dan Rather's lips (and was only mentioned twice on all of CBS News), Rather replied: "Juanita Broaddrick, to be perfectly honest, I don't remember all the details of Juanita Broaddrick. But I will say that – and you can castigate me if you like. When the charge has something to do with somebody's private sex life, I would prefer not to run any of it."

If only the press had extended that same courtesy to Mike Tyson! Rape has as much to do with "somebody's private sex life" as Bush's National Guard service does.

Admittedly, Juanita Broaddrick's charge against Clinton – that Bill Clinton raped her so brutally that her clothing was torn and her lip was swollen and bleeding, hence his parting words of "you'd better put some ice on that" – was not a story on the order of Augusta National Golf Course's exclusion of women members. But, unlike the Bush drug-use charge, which remains unsupported to this day, Broaddrick's allegations had been fully corroborated by NBC News – which then refused to air Lisa Myers' report until after Clinton's acquittal in the Senate.

Fortunately for Ms. Mapes, Rather also described Bill Clinton as "honest," explaining to O'Reilly, "I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things." This must have come as great comfort to Mapes, as she based an entire story about Bush's outrageous behavior in the National Guard on one Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.

Among the issues that might have raised questions about relying on Burkett as your source before accusing a sitting president of having disobeyed direct military orders are:



Burkett had a long-standing grudge against the National Guard for failing to pay for his medical treatment for a rare tropical disease he claims he contracted during Guard service in Panama.

He blamed Bush, who was governor at the time, for the Guard's denial of medical benefits because, as everyone knows, the Texas governor's main job is processing medical claims from former National Guard members.

After leaving the Guard, Burkett suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression.

At the meeting where he was supposed to give Mapes the National Guard documents, Burkett brought "two binders full of depositions and other documents that were apparently from his litigation with the National Guard over health benefits" – apparently he forgot the two shoeboxes full of UFO photos he'd collected over the years.

He had compared Bush to Hitler – which admittedly could have been just his way of establishing his bona fides to Democrats.

He had told a number of stories over the years about Bush's National Guard service, all of which had collapsed under conflicting evidence and even his own contradictory accounts – which is to say the stories were both made up and inaccurate.

In exchange for the National Guard documents, Burkett demanded money, "relocation assistance" if the story put him or his family in danger (perhaps oceanfront property for a quick getaway) and direct contact with the Kerry campaign.

Even before the story aired, Burkett's description of his own source for the documents kept changing. He said he received the documents anonymously in the mail. He said he was given the documents by someone who would "know what to do with [the documents] better than" he would. He said his source was Chief Warrant Officer George Conn – amid copious warnings that CBS "should not call Chief Warrant Officer Conn because he would deny it" and further that "Conn was on active duty and could not be reached at his Dallas home."

Burkett needn't have worried about crack investigator Mary Mapes getting in touch with his alleged source. Even though a three-second search on Google would have revealed that (1) Burkett was crazy, and (2) he had tried to use Conn as a source before and Conn had vehemently denied Burkett's claims, Mapes told the investigating committee "she did not consider Chief Warrant Officer Conn's denial to be reliable."

It seems Burkett had told Mapes that "Conn was still in the military and that his wife threatened to leave him if he spoke out against President Bush." That was good enough for Mapes. She concluded that Conn – the only person who could have corroborated Burkett's story – was not to be trusted. Instead, Mapes placed all her faith in the disgruntled, paranoid nut with a vendetta against Bush, an extensive psychiatric history and an ever-growing enemies list. I'm referring to Bill Burkett here, not Dan Rather.

Finally, Burkett claimed a woman named Lucy Ramirez had passed the documents to him at a livestock show in Houston. It is believed that this account marks the exact day that Burkett's lithium prescription ran out. Despite the fact that no one at CBS was able to locate Ramirez, CBS stuck with the story.

This isn't a lack of "rigor" in fact-checking, as the CBS report suggests. It's a total absence of fact-checking. CBS found somebody who told the story they wanted told – and they ran with it, wholly disregarding the facts.

Curiously, though Mapes trusted Burkett implicitly, she was very careful not to reveal his name to anyone at CBS, probably because she would have been laughed out of the room.

Instead, Mapes described Burkett in the abstract as: "solid," "without bias," "credible," "a Texas Republican of a different chromosome," a "John McCain supporter," "reliable" and "a maverick" – leaving out only "Burkett is convinced he can communicate with caterpillars" and "his best friend is a coffee table." His name was not important. It's not as if he was the sole source for a highly damaging story about the president eight weeks before the election or anything. Oh wait ...

At a meeting with CBS lawyers the day the story would air, Mapes "did not reveal the source's name or anything negative about the source," but "expressed 'enormous confidence' in her source's reliability and said that he was solid with no bias or credibility issues." She described Burkett as a "moralistic stickler." The subject of UFOs simply never came up.

Mapes trusted Burkett on the basis of the following:



"Mapes told the panel that she spoke to a mainstream media reporter, who had known Lt. Col. Burkett since 2001, and she stated that he viewed Lt. Col. Burkett as reliable." At least it wasn't one of those unreliable bloggers throwing anything up on the Net and ruining reputations!

"Mapes told the panel that she informed the Burketts that she was worried the documents might be a 'political dirty trick.' Mapes said that the Burketts appeared 'genuinely shocked' at the suggestion and this reaction gave her comfort." (You could tell they were really shocked because they had the same look on their faces that Condi Rice had when Richard Clarke first told her about al-Qaida.)

Mapes really hated George Bush and would do anything to make him lose the election.

Actually, Mapes did not put her last reason in writing, which created a real mystery for the CBS investigating committee. Proving once again how useless "moderate Republicans" are, "The CBS Report" – co-authored by moderate Republican Dick Thornburgh – found no evidence of political bias at CBS.

If Fox News had come out with a defamatory story about Kerry based on forged documents, liberals would be demanding we cut power to the place. (Fortunately, the real documents on Kerry were enough to do the trick.) But the outside investigators hired by CBS could find no political agenda at CBS.

By contrast, the report did not hesitate to accuse the bloggers who exposed the truth about the documents of having "a conservative agenda." As with liberal attacks on Fox's "fair and balanced" motto, it is now simply taken for granted that "conservative bias" means "the truth."

[Mule]

At least CBS isn't biased like that Fox network.

[bryanthompson]

[350HP930]

Originally posted by Mule
At least CBS isn't biased like that Fox network.

Each is as bad as the other but the partisan fools that subscribe to either can't recognize it.

[cegerer]

A little more fuel for the fire

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/1/13/160433.shtml

[RoninLB]

as in staying with this subject title "..... Whitewash"

I figure Hillary will "..... Whitewash" her latest scam about the fed indictment of her 2000 campaign finance director David Rosen. This is more interesting than poor innocent Dan Rather.

I'm not sure if she can hide her connection like she hide the famous "billing records". Worst case is that the feds won't wind up with enough info to secure an indictment, like the last few times, against her.

I mean what's $280,000, for her NY campaign, among friends of Hillary. I figure it was only a clerical error. No big deal.

Besides Rosen can do some time in the can with Web Hubbell and Sue McDougal and have a threesome. What are "friends of Hillary" around for anyway if not to party hearty ?

[Overpaid Slacker]

Dan Rather: "Our Long National Nightmare is Over"
(2005-01-10) -- Veteran CBS News anchor Dan Rather greeted today's release of the 224-page report on the 60 Minutes 'memogate' scandal by saying, "Our long national nightmare is over. Now is the time, in fact, it is past time to move on."

The report showed that Mr. Rather, and at least four colleagues, suffered from a condition called 'myopic zeal,' which is apparently terminal in four-out-of-five cases.

"Usually, the buck stops here," said Mr. Rather. "But in this case, the buck stopped over there. So, now I return to the seat of trust, behind the desk of integrity at CBS."

After his retirement from the CBS Evening News in March, Mr. Rather said he may pursue doing commercial endorsements.

"My agent has already been contacted by Dupont," he said, "about a series of educational TV spots on the benefits of Teflon."

CBS Switches to Reality Gameshow Format

(2005-01-11) -- When life hands you a lemon, the old saying goes, make lemonade. CBS News President Andrew Heyward is doing just that, announcing today that the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather will be re-launched on March 10 as Myopic Zeal: The CBS Evening News Gameshow.

"It's edgy, it's hip and it capitalizes on our key asset -- intermittent credibility," said Mr. Heyward, who survived a recent epidemic of myopic zeal which proved terminal for four of his staff. "Since the internal investigation report, viewers have wondered if we could ever be trusted again. Instead of trying to rebuild that shattered credibility, which would take years and millions of dollars, we're going to roll with the punches."

The new show will feature the same set, the same reporters and the same style as Evening News Classic, but during each segment viewers can go to a website and vote on which elements of each story may be false, or at least lacking adequate authentication. Prizes will include cash and a chance to become a 'Myopic Zeal' correspondent for a day, which includes the full training course in ethics which 'big-time journalists' now receive.

"It gets the viewers involved in the story in a way that was possible before only on a blog," said Mr. Heyward. "We've taken a hard look at the blogosphere and decided, if you can't beat them, join them. We'll even let the viewers vote on why the errors were made, whether by myopic zeal, political subterfuge or gross incompetence."

The embattled news czar said production costs for the new show would be the same as the old, "since the reporters and producers won't have to do anything differently."

The network has begun talks with Mr. Rather's talent agent in hopes of pulling him out of semi-retirement to sign him as 'anchor' for the new show.

"For decades, Dan Rather has been our face and voice of intermittent credibility and myopic zeal," said Mr. Heyward. "Sure, there are others in this industry who are as zealous and as credible but he's the Tiffany anchor, having done for this network what anchors do best."

[Overpaid Slacker]

350, why is it that when presented with evidence of bias, fraud, wrongdoing, etc. by those to whom you're sympathetic it's always this relativist "well, everybody does it/your guys are as bad too (almost always w/o specifics)/we're no worse than you are..."

However, when it is someone whom you're determined to hate, their flaws are almost always condemned in the most absolute, intolerant terms?

I might not be paying close enough attention, but most conservatives don't begin and end any defense of their side with "yeah, well Clinton did ____". That particular abomination on the presidency may be mentioned (usually in the context of the passes he was given by our media) but it's usually not the alpha and omega of a conservative defense.

Whereas, it seems to me, to the intellectually and morally bankrupt Democrats (which is not all of them), such a statement at once excuses their behavior, spreads unspecific blame on conservatives and is intended to preclude any further inquiry. Kind of weak, no?

JP

[Overpaid Slacker]

First comes the crime: Dan Rather's late hit on President Bush's Air National Guard service, featuring what were revealed almost immediately to be forged documents.

Then comes the coverup: 12 days of CBS stonewalling with Dan Rather (a) calling his critics "partisan political operatives," (b) claiming falsely that the documents were authenticated by experts, (c) claiming he had "solid sources," which turned out to be an anti-Bush partisan with a history of prolific storytelling. (emphasis added)

Now comes the twist: The independent investigation, clueless and in its own innocent way disgraceful, pretends that this fiasco was not politically motivated.

It does note that the show's producer called the Kerry campaign's Joe Lockhart to alert him to the story and to urge him to contact the purveyor of the incriminating documents. It says this constitutes an "appearance of political bias." What would producer Mary Mapes have to do to go beyond appearance? Show up at Kerry headquarters? CBS pursued the story for five years. Five years for a minor episode in the President's life? The story had been vetted not only in two Texas gubernatorial races, but twice more by the media, in 2000 and earlier in 2004.

To what does the report attribute Mapes' obsession with the story? Her Texas roots. She's from Texas and likes Texas stories. Believe that and you will believe that a 1972 typewriter can tuck the letter "i" right up against the umbrella of the letter "f" (as can Microsoft Word).

The bungle is attributed to haste and sloppiness. Haste, yes. To get the story out in time to damage, perhaps fatally, the President's chances of reelection. This is a perfect illustration of a commonplace phenomenon: the mainstream media's obliviousness to its own liberal bias, captured by Pauline Kael's famous remark after Nixon's 1972 landslide: "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him." Polls of the media elite have confirmed her inadvertent insight. One impartial poll, taken by the Freedom Forum in 1996, found that of 139 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents, 89% supported Clinton in the previous election versus 7% for Bush. America went 43%-37%. (emphasis added)

Some say it is possible to be a partisan at home and yet consciously bias-free at work. The Project for Excellence in Journalism studied mainstream stories in September and October 2004. Take Oct. 1-14: Percent of negative stories about Bush - 59%. Percent of negative stories about Kerry - 25%. Stories favorable to Bush, 14%. To Kerry, 34%. You do not have to be a weatherman to ascertain wind direction. In a February 2003 Gallup poll, 45% of Americans surveyed said the media were too liberal, 15% said they were too conservative. Bias spectacularly, if redundantly, reconfirmed by Rathergate. All that is missing is a written confession.

[Overpaid Slacker]

As the dust settles from the C-BS investigation into the faked Texas Air National Guard memos, I thought it might be worthwhile to offer up a quick quiz to see how well people were paying attention.

1) How long after the initial airing in September did C-BS acknowledge that the memos were most likely fakes?
A) One day
B) One week
C) One month
D) Two months, after the election
E) Four months, with the release of the report

2) C-BS referred to many of their report's detractors as "Republican activists," "Republican lawyers," and "Republican officials." How many of their supporters were branded with the term "Democratic" or "liberal?"
A) 1
B) 2
C) 4

3) When C-BS first announced the commission and its report, they said the investigation would be over in a matter of "weeks, not months." How many weeks passed between the announcement and the report?
A) 2
B) 4
C) 6
D) 8

4) On the day the report was released, how did Dan Rather report on it?
A) A strict just-the-facts approach, neither emphasizing nor minimizing his own role
B) Taking the opportunity to again apologize to the American people
C) Reported strictly on the facts, while reasserting his belief in the inherent accuracy of the piece

5) Whom did the Report name as the likely identity of the original source for the forged documents?
A) Bill Burkett
B) Linda Starr
C) Karl Rove
D) David Van Os
E) Ben Barnes

(Answers below the fold)


1) We're still waiting.

2) None.

3) About 14 (3 1/2 months).

4) He took the day off and let Bob Schieffer handle the news.

5) They refused to conclude whether or not they were fakes, and didn't investigate who supplied them.

Yes, I know there was no way you could have gotten any of these questions right. It's an unfair test. If you don't like it, go complain to Boccardi and Thornburgh.

[350HP930]

Originally posted by Overpaid Slacker
350, why is it that when presented with evidence of bias, fraud, wrongdoing, etc. by those to whom you're sympathetic it's always this relativist "well, everybody does it/your guys are as bad too (almost always w/o specifics)/we're no worse than you are..."

I am just pointing out to myopic people like yourself that the entire cabal I like to call 'corporate media' is biased and corrupt.

Here you are trying to claim that CBS has some monopoly on distorting and twisting events when your own preferred sources are just as bad.

[Overpaid Slacker]

Have I said that the sources that I prefer are unbiased?

Is my myopia so severe that I've missed me, myself, making the very claims you ascribe to me?

I am certainly not claiming, and never would claim, that CBS has a monopoly on distorting and twisting events -- examples are legion: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Washington Post, Boston Globe, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CNN ... the list goes on.

But while you're patting yourself on the back for iconoclasm in news sources, please don't delude yourself to believe (which, by inference it appears from your post that you have) that non "corporate media" would be unbiased and/or pure. That would be ... myopic.

So we're in agreement on the biased nature of our news sources. Why do you (as far as I've seen, anyway) rail only against Fox and not display publicly your contempt to those sources of a pronounced left position?

JP

[ronin]

Originally posted by 350HP930
I am just pointing out to myopic people like yourself...

ah yes, the charred-beyond-recognition caked-in-denial hasn't-seen-emmetropia-since-gradeschool crock calling the kettle black

[RoninLB]

people read and listen to what reinforces their beliefs imo.

If you buy into that then try this.
At least 60% of the tilt twords liberal or conservative is based on the genetic makeup. The info started at the U of Minn and is slowly gaining acceptance as a study. The problem is that only the conservative tilt has been studied since the '50s. I guess the high minded academic has seen no need to explain liberalism till now.. go figure.