Slashdot Mirror
CBS Cleans House In Wake of Erroneous Story
An independent review panel gave CBS News a scathing rebuke for its story last fall about President Bush's national guard service. The report noted that in a story that was neither fair nor accurate, and did a "disservice" to the American public, the CBS News staff had a "myopic zeal" to get the story first and gave a "rigid and blind defense" after it aired. The story's producer, Mary Mapes, was fired. Three other executives were asked to resign. The network, noting that he was scheduled for retirement from CBS Evening News in a couple of months, recommended no action be taken against Dan Rather.
Would it have been different had the election turned out different?
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
2004 was the Year Of The Blogger? Bringing down a shady and haphazard 'unbiased' report about a presidential candidate through fact-checking and plausibility is a powerful statement of the strength of the internets ...
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
Rather still stands by the story. The old coot has lost it. Sadly, he is just the poster child of what is wrong with the main stream media. They are used to watching others but sure shrivel up when the light is turned on them. Booyah to all the unwashed masses in their pajamas. I think that this year has shown a step forward for democracy and the citizenry taking back the country from the elites. Next target should be lifetime Congress Critters. Let's start with my state, and oust McCain.
Now when is /. going to start doing the same?
:)
Proudly awaiting my flamebait mods.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
From Atrios:
The funny (and of course overlooked by the cranial-rectal inversion crowd) thing about the CBS/document story is that contrary to the screeching about it, the entire saga is proof that there is no goddamn liberal media.
Jayson Blair was fired in noisy disgrace for making up mostly harmless stuff, taking down Howell Raines with him. One botched news story at CBS, in which the substances was entirely true but the window dressing was not authenticated, and multiple people lose their jobs, and it becomes the biggest media story of the year. Why do we know or care? Because the right wing cranks demanded the head of the "liberal" Clinton-hating-obsessive Howell Raines because he opposed the Iraq war by putting Judith Miller on the front page. That story garnered blanket wall to wall media coverage, and has established itself as the reference point for "bad media," with the universal liberal media consensus being that it was in part a consequence of affirmative action programs.
Judith Miller - Shitty reporting. Doesn't believe it's her job to try to verify what her sources tell her. Claimed she was "proved fucking right," though about what we're not sure. Times defends her. Lots of people dead.
Jack Kelley was fired rather quietly with not very much publicity from USA Today after it was discovered he manufactured massive piles of horeshit over a period of several years about things which actually did matter. Editors ignored complaints for years, by their own admission in part because they trusted him because he was a devout Christian. One or two day minor story, no one knows who Jack Kelley is, and while it was a much more serious problem, his name, unlike Blair's, is not the standard name invoked as an example of "bad media." Editors did resign in the wake, but for some reason did not become household names and are not regularly mentioned as examples of "bad editors."
Stephen Glass -- made lots of shit up. Coddled, protected, and promoted heavily by conservative editors at the New Republic who never had their reputations tarnished by the situation.
Even more serious stuff:
Jeff Gerth: Original Whitewater story almost entirely wrong, with Gerth clearly lying about parts of it (that is, parts were false in ways which he clearly knew were false). Times defends him and the story to this day.
Lisa Myers -- deliberately alters tapes to convey false story about Mrs. Clinton. Her punishment? Promotion.
Chris Vlasto -- Many sins, including pulling a "Lisa Myers" himself, producing a segment for Nightline with deliberately improperly edited tape. Punishment? Promotion.
Jeff Greenfield -- Nightline correspondent on Vlasto produced segment. Punishment? Cushy job at CNN.
I could go on and on. But, the worst Rather has been accused of by sensible people is letting partisanship cloud his judgment. Accepting that as true just for sake of argument, it's still a far less egregious sin than most of the Whitewater-era horseshit which has never been acknowledged as horseshit by the liberal media, even though unlike the Rather incident, much of that horseshit was clearly deliberately manufactured by the producers and reporters. These events were recycled and echoed throuhgout the entire liberal media, with no one calling foul and no one calling for their heads. Without making any statement about what the appropriate consequences for "Rathergate" should be, it's clear that the media attention by that liberal media and the actual consequences have been much greater than dozens of worse incidents involving clear deliberate deception by people in the media.
Dan Rather - evil biased liberal whose partisanship led him to jump the gun on a story? Believe that if you want, I don't really care. But, "Rathergate" proof of "liberal media?" Just the opposite.
The gist from The News Hour was that they acted out of haste to get a leg up on the other networks. Dan Rather had been really busy beforehand and didn't have time to do proper follow-ups on the story himself. The whole thing was just a big helping of really really bad journalism. Also, the other networks were chasing this story, too, it's just that CBS made themselves look like asses, first.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
On page 71 of the report, we find this interesting tidbit:
Mapes eventually tracked down Lieutenant Colonel Killian's son who, according to her notes, told her that then-Lieutenant Bush had volunteered for active duty in Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.
Other parts in the report indicate that there was no waiting list for pilots.
Uh because CBS had a sterling reputation for journalistic integrity and wants to get it back. Fox has a reputation for being a mouthpeice for the political views of the owners (who freely admit this by the way).
CBS news isn't alone or even fucking the worst offender -- Fox News and the New York Times have done far worse, for far longer. It's ridiculous to single out CBS News for one bad story. Sieg heil, GOP!
the top media players have a castle so big they can play peasant roles anytime.... blurring the issues even more
Has anyone else here noticed an extreme lack of scrutiny of the source of the documents? No interview in which he's asked why he did it. He never made a public statement explaining how he created the documents. Ironic that the story about CBS not asking the tough questions is not asking any of the hard questions.
Of course the CBS producers should be accountable for publishing simulated memos. But, lost in the story of the memos, is the fact that the story of Bush skipping Vietnam out of privilege was verified in their story, outside of the simulated documentation. They put the secretary in the office at the time, who said the memos were fake, on the air, where she said that the story itself was true, in her eyewitness experience. Others party to Bush's favorable treatment also gave their eyewitness accounts, corroborating the story. The established facts are that Bush was skipped out of the Vietnam draft as a favor to his powerful Texas politician father.
There's still a very important question of *who* supplied those memos that effectively killed the story just as it was being strongly corroborated. But of course that story will never be investigated, let alone told, as the lesson of Bush's "AWOL memos" is that it's too hot to touch, when there's press releases you could be transcribing instead. The baby has now drowned in the discarded bathwater.
--
make install -not war
I wonder how much exactly did Dan Rather have to do with the story? I mean, is his job literally just to read whatever the behind the scenes people write? Or does he actually have some input into writing the stories and doing the research, etc. While he's "retiring" and they're not doing anything to him its a tremendously transparent cop out. But I wonder if its justified. If his job is really to just read whatever they tell him to, then he should be completely absolved of all fault.
Besides, a little house cleaning couldn't hurt. The news can stand to lie a little less.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
What is the difference between firing somebody and asking them to resign?
I thought taking risks by trusting sources is something journalists did regularly. Woodward and Bernstein did this and happened to be right. Now we treat them and their investigative reporting as ideals of the fourth estate. I just hope the backlash from this incident doesn't make journalists too cautious when reporting the news for fear of being wrong, or worse, being labeled as biased.
Be careful about the Slashdot story. It does not say what you might imagine it says. Below are quotes from a video of a CBS newscast, CBS Panel's Conclusions:
"The story wasn't ready." "The panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries." "We didn't find any actual [political] bias." "Mary Mapes said she still believes the documents were well corroborated."
NOTE: CBS has recently begun offering videos of its most important newscasts online, mostly without commercials. The videos display only in Internet Explorer, not the latest versions of Mozilla or Firefox. CBS uses Javascript in poor ways, there are problems with its video servers, and some videos have been edited incorrectly for transmission. I get different results at different times. I complained to CBS about this about two weeks ago in connection with another story, and did not receive a reply. They seem to be working on the problems, since delivery has changed and improved in the last two weeks. Ignore messages that say, "Could not connect to remote server." I could not play the videos with the latest version of Opera, which is quite compatible with IE-specific coding, but that may have been because of my specific installation.
Note that the quotes from the CBS newscast don't say that CBS has decided the story was false. CBS only fully accepts its responsibility for sloppiness in the preparation of the story.
Also, the CBS focus was misleading. The real story was that George W. Bush disappeared from Air National Guard records in exactly the same month that the ANG instituted drug testing.
Lt. Bush's reported behavior was consistent with the known behavior of alcoholics, and Bush has admitted to being an alcoholic. Alcoholics often use other drugs to heighten the desired effects of alcohol and to try to diminish the undesired effects.
I served in the U.S. Air Force in the years around the time that Lt. Bush served, and I was stationed at a base that had the aircraft he flew. The CBS documents were consistent with the operation of the Air Force at that time, which was remarkably tolerant of alcoholism. The entire U.S. culture at the time was tolerant of alcoholism, but the USAF as I experienced it was even more so.
I have specific, detailed knowledge that the Air Force was far more corrupt than has been reported in stories I've seen. For example, F-106 aircraft, the successors to the F-102 aircraft that Lt. Bush flew, had severe defects in their inertial guidance systems that meant that F-106s were often not available to perform their mission. This was not a conscious conspiracy; they could not get the systems to work properly, and apparently all USAF departments tended to cover up failures rather than report them sufficiently. Remember that this was a time when people had far less technical knowledge than people generally have today.
At the time, no one would have found it remarkable that a pilot was an alcoholic, or that someone received special treatment because of political pressure. That was just the way things worked. This is so important that maybe I should repeat it: That's just the way things worked back then. Back then few adults had parents who had attended college. The accepted educational level was far less in a way that cannot be measured by the number of college years someone had.
I know about the failure in F-106s because I fixed the problem. I found that some of the amplifiers used in the inertial guidance system had parasitic oscillations because of solder joints of amazingly poor quality. At the time, I was familiar with all base operations that involved electronics repair, and I very much doubt there was anyone else on base who had enough technical knowledge to know what parasitic oscillations were. Mostly they just kept replacing things until they found that the symptom of the problem had gone away. We Slashdot readers take technical knowledge for granted, but widespread te
The story is accurate. There was plenty of other evidence besides phony memos. Which makes me suspect Karl Rove as the source of the forged memos, since the forgeries effectively cut off legitimate discussion of this issue. Now conservatives can just laugh off the charges and blame them on the phony memos rather than actually respond to them.
An employee who is fired doesn't get a severance package. An employee who resigns, does.
Asking executives to resign is essentially giving them the golden parachute. They make some bogus statement ("I want to spend time with my family" or "It's time to move on") and they get to keep their loot.
"The panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries."
But their document expert concluded, categorically, that the documents were produced on a computer after the 1970s. That's pretty close to saying "forgery". The only reservations against declaring them a forgery, that I can think of, is that they were copies, that time travel could be at play here, or the remote possibility that they were indeed TANG documents about ANOTHER Lt. Bush from the 1990s misdated to the 1970s.
"We didn't find any actual [political] bias."
To do that Mapes & Co would have to admit it, or submit to polygraphs or whatever. But Mapes' emails show how she was trying to get the documents from Bill Burkett by connecting him with the DNC, and by getting him a book deal. Something about affecting the momentum of the campaign.
But is bias onlyt a clearly stated policy of working for one of the candidates, which she came pretty close to doing, or is bias also letting yourself be affected by wishing that the story is true?
Something rather unimportant to our world today turned into quite farce. But aren't anybody going to look at WHO actually made the documents? It's illegal to forge military documents, and some states have laws against trying to influence elections with false documents.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Times New Roman was used from the early 1930s. But Microsoft Times New Roman was a later development.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Mapes was actually told, by more than one person, that the unit actually DIDN'T have a waiting list for becomming a fighter pilot.
There were waiting lists for becomming a regular enlisted man (ground crew etc.) in the TANG, though. (One of the guys said they didn't have a waiting list at ALL.)
Mapes was also told that after training, Bush Jr. volunteered to go to Vietnam, a request that was denied because he had to few flying hours.
BTW: Is David Boise's schedule free to represent her in the wrongfull termination lawsuit?
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
But how could they know that CBS would be so gullible as to fall for some .doc's?
My theory: It started as a joke when the Bush AWOL story started circulating. Then it got passed on from hand to hand gaining credibility; in which case there's some prankster sitting around both snickering/crying and fearing prosecution.
Or it could be this Martin Heldt guy that started researching it and was told that he didn't have a smoking gun.
Then there's the shady hand-overs, Burkett claiming copying them and then burning the originals, etc.
It's all a bad agent movie that got side-tracked from the fighting terrorism stuff.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
It's part of the report, but it's hardly an ommission on the Slashdot editors' part.
If we had to cover all the relevant points, it would need a feature sized article.
- The firings.
- The reasons given for the rush to air.
- The reasons for the sone-walling and outright dismissal of any critisism
- The suggested remedies.
- Concluding that there was no bias, despite the evidence.
- Coordinating with a political party.
- Mapes' response.
- The typography expert concluding that the documents were computer generated, but the overall panel witholding a conclusion on it.
- The things you mentioned (Mapes being told: No pilot waiting list, Bush voluntered for Vietnam service during his TANG stay.)
- "The false statement in the September 8 Segment that an expert had authenticated the Killian documents"
- The reactions from other media.
- The central role of debunking the story. And in cheerleading it, and in touting "fake, but accurate" expert.
- The DDoS attacks and blog worms shutting down some of the blogs central to this story.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
... but little attention has been paid to the communications between CBS news and the Kerry campaign.
Let me back up a bit.
When the entire 'memogate' deal started, I held out. I kept saying, "I trust Rather. I trust CBS". Sure Rather is biased. It's fairly obvious to anyone to takes a look. But he has a great history behind him. That history was hard to ignore. It took me a few days to see the memos for what they really were. And when I did, I was upset. And when Rather continued to defend them, in spite of CBS's own document experts coming forward saying they NEVER validated the documents, I got pissed.
When it came out that there was at least SOME communication between CBS and the Kerry campaign and the story aired the same flippin' time the "Fortunate Son" BS started from the Kerry camp, I became livid.
Mapes claimed at the time that the only communication she had with the Kerry camp was when she put Burkett in touch with them. That, it turns out, was a lie. It appears Chad Clanton tells a story a bit different than Mapes.
As the report states, there is no evidence that the CBS piece was politically biased. Yet there is certainly quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that the driving force of this piece, Mapes, WAS politically motivated. No. Obsessed would be a better word. The apparent collusion between CBS news and the Kerry campaign was not addressed to my satisfaction. Her outright lies that the documents had a clear chain of custody, came from an 'unimpeachable' source and continued insistence of their accuracy -- it's just appalling. Add to this the links to the Kerry campaign and coincedental "Fortunate Son" ads, any reasonable person should suspect Mapes of being out to "get" Bush.
And that is what I suspect. I believe Rather stuck with story so long out of trust of Mapes. And I believe Mapes had an agenda that those around her refused to see. I'm glad Mapes was fired. I don't think she'll ever have a name in her field again. I have little doubt she'll write a book, make a bundle and retire. But she will no longer be working.
You're right, there is a clear difference.
When CBS accidently issues an erroneous report, people get fired and they apologize.
I'm still waiting for the WMD apology (or for a massive US intel shake-up).
I'm still waiting for someone in management to get fired over Abu Ghraib.
At least no one died as a result of CBS's blunders.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Hey! You got modded redundant! That's funny!
There is no difference between Microsoft Times New Roman and anyone elses' Times New Roman. Linotype licenses them all, and is not about to corrupt their most famous font. "Microsoft Times New Roman" merely refers to Microsoft's license from Linotype. Anyhow, the fonts used in the CBS Bush documents are definitely NOT the Time New Roman font. They merely use the same spacing, like hundreds or maybe even thousands of fonts.
Where's my -1 (No Shit Sherlock) Mod...
You said, But their document expert concluded, categorically, that the documents were produced on a computer after the 1970s. That's pretty close to saying "forgery".
Haven't you ever seen an old magazine or newspaper? They were all typeset. How do you think that was done?
Everyone agrees that they would have been produced with some kind of computer, or a Linotype machine!!! Linotype machines were made in the 1940's.
The only way to get proportionally-spaced type without a computer is to set the type by hand. Thousands of people have the equipment to do that. I know a graphic artist who bought her letterpress machine very cheaply on eBay, including boxes of type. It cost more to ship it than to buy it. But typesetting is time-consuming to do by hand.
However, that's not what would have happened, if the documents are real. Probably Lt. Colonel Killian's secretary was on vacation. He was very worried about being disciplined for breaking USAF and ANG rules. He didn't break a rule himself, but it was his repsonsibility to report anyone who broke the rules. On the other hand, if he openly reported one alcoholic, he would get severe hostility from all the others, and there were an amazing number. So, to protect himself, he scribbled something and took it to be typed. Instead of typing, he got typesetting; something that sometimes happened to me back then.
That hypothesis fits the facts. But why were the documents in language the secretary did not recognize? It's obvious if you know the situation at the time. Most people in a leadership position in the military at the time were functionally illiterate. They could not themselves write a sensible-seeming, gramatically-correct document that communicated what they wanted. So, the secretaries studied how to write documents in the accepted manner. I remember a secretary being scornful of an official document I wrote, because, although it was grammatically correct, it was not in the proper stilted military language. It is easy to guess that Lt. Colonel Killian's secretary was on vacation, and the woman who typed the document just transcribed his handwritten notes. That kind of thing happened all the time. A military office did not stop functioning when the secretary went on vacation.
Probably it is better if people not try to analyze this situation unless they have experience with typesetting.
I myself do not take any position on whether the documents are genuine. But, my first guess, before I saw them, was that they were fake. However, when I looked at them, I laughed. The documents have a defect that was produced when machines at that time were not properly adjusted. I was involved with typesetting in the years after the documents were dated, and I knew that a modern-day faker would not know to introduce that defect, especially since the defect would convince only people like me, and would make everyone else think negatively.
As I said in the grandparent post, the USAF was extremely corrupt at the time. (I have no information about now.) A co-worker went up the chain of command to protest that airmen were being used to construct golfing facilities on the base. He was eventually given a meeting with the base commander, who just took a golf ball out of his drawer and bounced it on his desk. Meeting over.
If you could go back in time and ask someone if a pilot could be an alcoholic, or if an rich person would get preferential treatment, they would just laugh! Back then the man who could drink the most was considered the most manly. This is similar to now, when some misguided men think they are more manly if they act like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I still remember Powell powerpointing the UN on Hussein's WMD. Most of it, it turned out, were excerpts from some "The Bourne Identity" style doctoral thesis of some foreign affairs researcher. I still look forward for Bush's, Rumsfeld's, Powell's, Rice's public apology for duping the whole bloody world... but that'll never happen... they'll keep on yakking about "Mission accomplished" and FOX will be there, as patriotic as ever... bah
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
In the wake of these troubles, Dan Rather plans to turn to other matters after he retires in March. According to unnamed sources, Rather claims to have located Jack Ruby's Blackberry. He is going to use the information in it to reveal amazing breaththroughs in the JFK assassination.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I repeated the experiment myself with default Word settings. It was picture perfect.
Any, even experienced typographic experts who are Democrats and Kerry supports have analyzed it to death and concluded they were obvious fakes made in Word.
The Kos analysis is amateurish at best, written by people who do NOT do typography for a living, much less know how to analyze documents, nor are they capable of a simple Word experiment that backs it up in a way that even the common lay person see in a clear way.
Obviously, you did not do this experiment yourself.
However, when I looked at them, I laughed. The documents have a defect that was produced when machines at that time were not properly adjusted.
What defect? Does it have a name, or can you describe it to us?
Could it be introduced by the sampling in copying and faxing?
It's nice to talk to somebody who had some experience with this.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
If the machines were not adjusted correctly, adjoining letters would have a different vertical baseline. That's because adjoining letters in English words were different from the adjoining letters in the machine. The photocopying introduced serious distortions, but not so much in letters that were next to each other.
There's really no need to rely on me for information about this subject. Just go to your local library and find magazines from the 1970s. You will find lots of Times New Roman, and you can see the letter spacing and line spacing yourself. You need a magazine that published in ragged right, the same as the CBS Bush documents. Try People Magazine, for example.
When Microsoft Times New Roman was introduced, the entire point was not to irritate those who had decades of experience with typesetting Times New Roman on other machines. That's why Microsoft felt it was worth paying for a license. You can see the license by viewing the Microsoft Times New Roman font file with a binary viewer.
"But how could they know that CBS would be so gullible as to fall for some .doc's?"
At that level of the media, the social networks are unbelievable. eg. Brit Hume plays tennis with Bush Sr., going all the way back to when he was the ABC Whitehouse correspondent. Perhaps the social bond between the source and a producer, Dan Rather, etc, was strong enough that there was no question of their authenticity -- not knowing that their source was duped, or maybe their source's source. Ever play the game "Telephone?"
Taking your question extremely literally, they didn't have to know that CBS would fall for it. The penalty to the source if CBS caught the forgery is nil, so why not try?
How do you make that out from the aliasing? I think higher quality scans were comming out now, but I haven't found them yet.
If you're serious about this, you should get in contact with a blog or a newspaper, or maybe write to one of the document experts that have made statements about the memos.
The attempts that I have seen at authenticating the memos so far were
- An expert that only looked at signatures, but was passed off by CBS as if he had authenticated the documents as a whole.
- A typewriter repair man who was not a document examiner
- Somebody who typed out the text on a typewriter and compared it side by side with tiny images. An overlay showed this to be totally wrong.
- This man Hailey who cut and pasted, in photoshop, single characters from several different fonts, and concluded that they could be made with a typewriter font.
Still, nobody has come up with this mythical machine that could exactly replicate Microsoft Word with default settings.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
The CJR article has been as throroughly debunked as the original memos were. I really like you highlight his attacks on the bloggers but not any actual *evidence* that his charges were true.
Clear, Dark Skies
Faxing: Fau^Hxed Bush Memos
Thanks to Wikipedia.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
And while you're checking those magazines, be sure to look for ads featuring typewriters that produce the same typeface.
Pity that you won't find any though.
Clear, Dark Skies
that secretaries in small government offices used Linotype machines to type up confidential memos.
Clear, Dark Skies
Mr. Porkchop D. Clown, you didn't read the original comment in the thread before you posted.
I'm cribbing from Jonah Goldberg here, but he nailed it this morning at NR...
"First, the CBS report was supposed to do many things, two of them were: 1) Authenticate/explain the origin of those documents and, 2) address the issue that the Memo story was politically motivated. The report punts on both. They can tell us that the blogs were politically motivated from a conservative perspective, but on the biases that caused this entire scandal, we get silence."
While CBS is doing the right thing in at least admitting that the whole mess is their fault, they're still trying to stonewall on the all important issue of bias. As the note above said, they didn't hesitate to ascribe a political motive to the bloggers that called foul on Rather's report, but refuse to shine the same harsh light on themselves. One of the four execs that were chopped was closely involved with the Kerry Campaign throughout the whole story, and the source of the forged documents themselves was desperately trying to GET into the Kerry Campaign. So this wasn't a simple case of a mistake in the haste to break a story. Long after a long line of experts testified that the docs looked faked (and badly faked, at that), Dan Rather and his team stonewalled and held fast to the position that the story was true, the documents were real, their source was, in Rather's words, "unimpeachable", and that complaints were simply right wing anger, nothing more. That's not a simple matter of "haste"; that's partisan warfare, sorry Dan, but calling it like it is here.
Rather, because of his star status, was allowed to gracefully step down from the anchor position. But his team got sacked. Sounds to me like they took one for the boss...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It seems that there is always some uninformed person who posts comments to stories like this who doesn't realize that both U.S. President George W. Bush and U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney were both active alcoholics. So, here are some of their arrest records:
Bush and Cheney are the most arrested U.S. president and vice-president in history. George W. Bush was arrested once for the crime of DUI and Dick Cheney twice:
George W. Bush DUI, 1st record of arrest
George W. Bush DUI, 2nd record of arrest
George W. Bush was arrested 2 other times in his life, also, for stunts that were not something a sober person would find interesting.
Dick Cheney DUI, record of 1st arrest
Dick Cheney DUI, record of 2nd arrest
Definitely not caused by faxing.
I'm still waiting for the WMD apology (or for a massive US intel shake-up).
The NYT *did* apologize for its misreporting regarding WMD.
And there *was* a massive intel shake-up (supposedly; we'll see what actually comes of it).
I'm still waiting for someone in management to get fired over Abu Ghraib.
The general in charge of the prison *was* fired (well, indefinitely suspended pending the completion of the investigation, but she won't be back).
So, stop waiting for all this stuff.
"So shield, people, shield. And screen. And if you can shield a polling place, do it! I'm not saying to try to interfere with people's choices, but rather prevent them from being interfered with." --Magical Election Tampering: SHUT IT DOWN!
This is about purposely abusing the trust the American public has in certain news organizations to promote an agenda.
I suspect that if another news organization offered up such a ludicrous story about Kerry that the Blogs and rest of the media would jump on it as well.
What you see here is an end of an era. The scariest part of this ordeal is that before the advent of the net CBS's ploy would have worked, they were shouting down their naysayers. It makes you wonder just how many other stories about ANYTHING were false but buried by these groups. I wouldn't doubt that if one agency lied that others would ignore it, why? Simple, they have skeletons too.
Rather gate isn't proof of a liberal media, its proof that some very liberal leaning people at CBS used the trust their organization had as a tool to effect their own beliefs. That alone is one reason none of these people, including Rather, should be allowed to be journalist.
Taking money or falsifying stories should be the end of career move for any journalist.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well, it's a lot like security vulnerability stories. We just had that front page story on a single relatively non-dangerous vunerability found in Linux because it is unusual. On the other hand a half dozen vulnerabilities in Windows - including critically dangerous ones - barely rates a single story that doesn't even hit the front page because it's pretty much routine and non-newsworthy.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
People keep on making jokes about that "fake but accurate" line, but what phrase could better describe the Bush administration's opinion of the "evidence" of WMDs in Iraq?
Honestly, I sometimes wonder if anyone involved in politics isn't a complete hypocrite.
Rob
http://www.etherzone.com/2002/fahe071502.shtml
McCain did/is not seeking re-election. So don't bother trying to oust him.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
You typed politics.slashdot.org and I think you meant democraticunderground.com. That sort of "fake but accurate" crap doesn't fly in the real world.
Keep in mind, this doesn't prove the mainstream media to be liberal. Some recent news reports have shown otherwise.
Mods on crack I suppose -- the above is speculation, but the post gives reasons and discusses, whether or not mods agree with it.
I just find it very interesting how certain individual's "objective" standards always seem to follow their partisan efforts.
AWOL is a violation of the UCMJ.
So your statement reads "It wasn't a violation of the UCMJ so much as his immediate superiors not caring if he did something that was a violation of the UCMJ."
Whether his "immediate superiors" cared or not, a violation is a violation.
UCMJ == UNIFORM Code of Military Justice.
It applies to everyone in the military and it applies the same.No, AWOL does not imply anything. It is very clearly spelled out. Check the link above.His "immediate superiors" did not have the authority to authorize that.
Rather, it reads more like a rich kid got into a safe squadron during a war and got tired of it so he wanted to move to another place to work on a civilian project and just left (Absent Without Leave).
Once this was discovered, his politically positioned family and friends worked to get him an official discharge and forgiveness for any time remaining.
If it does not have an impact (translation: the politics of the individual journalists does not result in a "liberal media") then it is not "stupid" to ignore it.
"social bond between the source and a producer, Dan Rather, etc"
Yes. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes had friends among Texas Democrats, so you've got your connection there. As you said, I think the documents were passed along in a "Telephone" or relay manner, gaining credibility. It certainly helped that some of those who passed the documents were psychiatric cases and/or desperately wanted them to be real.
"The penalty to the source if CBS caught the forgery is nil"
- Possible criminal action
- Election-year tampering scandal that would have hurt Bush more than this nonsense hurt Kerry.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
You said, "It seems that there is always some uninformed person who posts comments to stories like this who doesn't understand the definition of "alcoholic".
Here is a guess: You are not an alcoholic. No one in your family is an alcoholic. You have no friends who are alcoholics.
Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney show the classic symptoms of being alcoholics. Here's a little of the voluminous evidence: The psychological effects of alcoholism provide a framework for understanding the Bush administration. See the section titled, "Typical personality characteristics of a recovered alcoholic". There is an enormous amount of information that would lead to this view, but in not included here.
The point of the comment that started this thread is not that the CBS Bush documents are genuine. That does not matter. The point is that the evidence shows that Bush quit the ANG the same month the ANG started drug testing because he had a drug problem.
One Bush family member said that she had seen George using cocaine on the grounds of Camp David while his father was president.
Which is why the phrase "Liberal media" still bandied about. Listen to Rush Limbaugh some time. And before you say otherwise, he does reflect mainstream Republican views. You're in Washington, so you can listen to KVI. Count how many times a day you hear "Liberal media" and its variations."pretty far left"? Then it shouldn't be hard for you to come up with a dozen articles supporting some "far left" cause such as drug de-criminalization or 100% removal of handguns from our civilian population.
What you see as "far left" is merely "less far Right". For real Left views, take a look at Europe's newspapers.Look at Bush's past speeches and see how many times he had refered to either "finding" or being "close to finding" WMD's in Iraq.
Politics today is not about informing the people on your team, but about giving them easily believed lies which will motivate them to keep your party in power.
The White House sexes up intelligence to create a case for WMDs, Condeleeza Rice talks about mushroom clouds, and GWB mentions Iraq is trying to get weapons grade plutonium in his state of the union, starts a war and costs this country billions, but he and his staff all get to keep their job.
Public officals who speak about news on TV aren't being held to a very lofty bar. Is there any way to get them under CBS managment?
==>Lancer---
Barnes may have assumed that his request helped GWB, but then he didn't know that there was no waiting list for pilots. But Mapes knew it.
Joseph Newcomer doesn't go as far as the blogs did. He won't accuse Hailey of fraud and call for his firing, but he does accuse Hailey of doing bad research.
The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries!: The Columbia Journalism Review
Personally, I was one of the people who did a directory listing of Hailey's web folder and found unfinished photoshop files before and after he put in superscripts, and the report before he altered it. Saving to several files for safety can bite your arse if you're committing a fraud. Phooey.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
"Some communication" is pretty meaningless without something concrete. What are the chances either campaign DIDN'T talk to any one of the major channels?
I also find it hilarious that so much hot air has been spent over "Memogate", considering the "fib factor" hack job done on Al Gore in 2000, and all the uncritical coverage of SBVFT. Where's the investigation into the ties between SBVFT and the Bush campaign, eh? And for all the conservatives who just can't let this go: at least when CBS used a questionable memo, at least it wasn't one of the primary factors in the loss of 1,300 American lives and over $120 billion dollars for a false cause.
- "The Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at '60 Minutes Wednesday' drove either the timing or the airing of the [Bush Guard] Segment," wrote Thornburgh and Boccardi. And just to ensure that nobody missed the point, they reiterated, "The Panel does not believe that political motivations drove the Sept. 8 Segment."
Bam, kicked Goldberg's ass. Now, for neocons who just can't let this go, I got three things for ya: SBFVT, Nigerian yellowcake, and a nice, warm cup of stfu.Your "default settings" printed characters with the same minute typographical flaws consistent with an actual physical key pressed against paper, i.e. all the "t"s slightly malformed in exactly the same way, and also with letters printed slightly above or below the line rather than perfectly vertically adjusted to the line? I'm sorry, that is just bullshit. All that shows is that "your eye" is not as good as an experts eye.
And please reference your claim "even experienced typographic experts who are Democrats and Kerry supports have analyzed it to death and concluded they were obvious fakes made in Word."
All a Word experiment shows is that a modern word processor can be set up to reproduce almost any style of letter if it has the correct fonts etc. It does not logically illuminate *at all* whether these documents are false or not, or I can prove any typewritten document for the last 50 years is fake because WOW! I can reproduce it in Microsoft Word!!
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
How wonderful! Cameron did it as just "an offhanded joke"! A senior news correspondant passes off a story without any clear indication it is false, but it's just a joke, get over it. Moreover, a story which is specifically designed to reach into middle America and press those levers which will make Kerry out to be laughable, to stereotype him in the eyes of the electorate.
And if they apologise for making up news, then that's OK, you don't even have to punish them! What a wacky world of news we live in nowadays!
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
An offhanded joke on a major news site? I see them, but to my mind they're clearly marked. And you have rather sidestepped the issue, Pudge. Does calling it an "offhanded joke" means that its OK? So if for example, some senior news correspondant on CNN for instance made up some quotes by Bush about, say, something ridiculous like God told him to invade Iraq, and ran the story as a news item, you would have no problem with that? And is it coincidental that the portrayal of Kerry exactly ties in with how Bush et al. were trying to smear Kerry at the time as girlish and weak?
I have read the item, yes. And to me, and probably to you, it was laughably obvious. But then, I am not a typical reader of the Fox News website. I suspect the way I and a typical reader would have interpreted the story would be somewhat different, don't you agree? And besides, how is it lying to say the story passes off without any clear indication it is false. Is it under a humour byline? It is marked as a parody? No. You can argue that its inherent ridiculousness marks it out, but I feel you are on shaky ground.
And how did Fox respond to the story breaking? They realised they had stepped over the line, retracted it, apologised and claimed to have reprimanded their reporter. They didn't try to say it was just a joke, c'mon guys lighten up! like you are.
I suppose in a strange way you are insulting the Fox news network. Your expectations of them are so low, you don't even think it's an issue when they fabricate news and give it top billing on their website.
I guess I have to say in the end that either you are deliberately being obtuse, being hopelessly biased, or a lousy journalist. Which is it?
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Also, it turns out that the camp was closed on the day that one of those "memos" says Lt. Bush should show up for a physical. Information that the panel ignored.
Fox's response to criticism was not to pass the whole incident off as a joke
Yes, it was. Stop lying. I even provided Fox's quote precisely to that effect.
And what was your quote? "The Fox apology read, in part, "The item was based on a reporter's partial script" My emphasis.
Uh, Pudge, by your own words you see the distinction. I thought I made it obvious enough the first time I wrote it. Ok let's try this one more time. MY POINT IS THAT FOX'S RESPONSE TO CRITICISM WAS NOT JUST TO SAY IT WAS JOKE. THERE WERE OTHER PARTS TO IT TOO!!!!11
Next you defensively quote various parts of my further explanation, when I was trying to make the distinction as crystal as possible as if I am accusing you of saying those things. This is an accusation in itself, an implied criticism that I am putting words in your mouth. Let's look at what came out of your mouth earlier:
Me: Cameron did it as just "an offhanded joke"!
Pudge: Yes. No clear-thinking person could possibly believe otherwise.
I have lambasted you for passing off the whole incident as just some sort of joke, and that is exactly what you were doing! Go back and read what you have actually written! Again and again I have explained away any supposed "lies" on my part by pointing to the fault in your own interpretation, and even when I do so you ignore the evidence, don't even deal with it or argue it, just staunchly accuse me of lying!!
I find myself in the position of trying to correct your own flawed and illogical posts to enable me to present some sort of response to them, which is amply illustrated with this, did you even go back and reread it, this is basic english comprehension:
Me: I think you meant to say "No." at the end of that line.
Pudge: No.
in relation to:
Me: you would have no problem with that?
Pudge: If it was intentional, or was an accident that was not immediately revoked and apologized for? Yes.
Yes you would have *no problem* with CNN making up a story if it "was intentional, or was an accident that was not immediately revoked and apologized for"? I can't argue with this, you don't even seem to know what you are saying.
Why you think "passing it off as a joke" is the same as "saying only that it was a joke, and not also a mistake" is beyond me.
Maybe it is beyond you, but it seems basic sentence construction is beyond you so we won't worry about that concern. Nice strawman though. To begin with you said the Fox story was a joke that they immediately apologised for. To me that is "passing it off as a joke". Because I believe it is more serious than that. The clue was the fact I said so! Passing it off as a joke is to belittle the event, obviously. And to belittle the event IS to suggest the mistake was a small one and unworthy of consideration.
Al Franken
Who?
You're a proven liar.
I'm not sure what I've done to offend you, other than giving as good as I got. You can repeat that I am a liar until you are blue in the face but if you look back over what has written, and think about what I am trying to say, I am sure you will eventually get the point. Goodbye.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Take the torture quiz. Just skip down to the quiz and see how many you get right. I got 8 out of 10.