[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.