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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.
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.
Or do you think Bush didn't go AWOL?
CBS airing forged documents is "rhetorical sleight-of-hand"?
Don't look now, but you're dangerously close to becoming an apologist for CBS... They screwed up. They've admitted it. The real tragedy here is that Dan Rather isn't also being punished as well. He gets special treatment for being a "name."
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Me: This entire controversy seems mostly rhetorical sleight-of-hand to deflect attention away from that.
You: CBS airing forged documents is "rhetorical sleight-of-hand"?
Thanks for proving my point.
You: The real tragedy here is that Dan Rather isn't also being punished as well. He gets special treatment for being a "name."
Kind of like someone else I can think of, someone who just happens to be president right now and was a pampered rich kid during the Vietnam war. Going AWOL is ok, but fuck up and publish forged documents... man, now that's a real crime.
Right.
Do you eat hypocrisy for all three meals a day, or just breakfast?
Rathergate neither proves, nor disproves, a pervasive liberal bias in the media, as the facts surrounding it are insufficient to such things. It's too small.
:-)
And I don't know how Myers, Greenfield, Glass, etc. disprove the liberal bias idea. They are liberals and they or their staffs did not get in trouble; doesn't that help PROVE the idea? And how does that tie into Rathergate anyway?
And yes, Kelley was worse than Blair, but who reads USA Today regularly? Who trusts it? Who had ever heard of any of the people involved? Sorry, it is necessarily a smaller story than what Blair did, because it was USA Today. Miller's another case, but what she did was -- journalistically -- not nearly as bad as what Blair did. Not even in the same universe.
Back to Rather, the problem is that never before has something like this hit someone so high up as him, and to compound matters, the network denied the truth for two weeks. Add to that the fact that it happened just before an election, and it was a powderkeg.
If that is really from Atrios, well, it's a good reason not to read his work.
That said, it's clear that Mapes herself was anti-Bush. There's no question of it. The story itself -- even assuming all her facts were correct -- is an entire non-story, and yet she was willing to lie to get it told. What did she try to prove? That Bush's ANG attendance record was, for a time, poor? We knew that. It didn't prove he was AWOL, it didn't prove anything more than what we already knew, at best. Why spend so much time and effort on what we already know? The contention was that it was a rush to get a new story, but even stipulating all the evidence as actual facts, it was not a new story.
Even worse than the forged documents, which few have discussed, is the deal with Barnes. What did he have to say, do you recall? That he spoke to an ANG official on Bush's behalf, but that no one asked him to do it, and that he did not know if this had any impact on Bush's entrance into the ANG. And Mapes had spoken to several ANG officials who denied Bush received any preferential treatment, but those quotes were excluded, and she instead framed Barnes' words to give the unmistakable and entirely unsubstantiated impression that Bush did get preferential treatment. Oh yeah, and she neglected to mention Barnes was campaigning heavily for John Kerry. Oops.
Again, even if he did get preferential treatment, I don't consider that significantly newsworthy, and question the bias of anyone who does. But that she not only had no evidence -- not even claims -- that he received preferential treatment, and in fact had only claims that he did not, and still framed it as though he did, is clear and unmistakable evidence of bias.
If all this doesn't prove bias on the part of Mapes, I don't know what possibly could.
I think it's obvious that the people who investigate and report the news are more on the left than on the right by far, and that this bias creeps into the news often. I don't think there's any liberal conspiracy in the media, and that the greatest bias in the media is to get a big story. But this was not Mapes' problem. Sure, there were other pressures, but it's entirely obvious that her goal was to prove her story against the President, and damn the facts, and she deserves to be fired as much as Blair and Kelley and Glass.
Not likely. Republicans would have just blamed the liberal media, just as Democrats are now blaming the liberal media (and exit/internet pollsters) for overstating their position.
"The Media" is a real easy target to blame, because it basically refers to everything that's been said about you and anything that's supposed to alter people's perceptions about you. I mean, on the surface, blaming the media makes sense, but when you look at it a little deeper, The Media is obviously involved in the public's vote, since The Media is essentially what "educates" the public.
Anything you read, even government documents, have been written in such a way as to project an opinion or include a bias. There's no such thing as "unbiased reporting". Some reporting is factually inaccurate (that's why these people are getting fired, or so they say), some reporting is factually accurate but draws incorrect or very shaky conclusions (Michael Moore is basically the champion of this, with sentences like, "Could Bush have been plotting TO KILL YOU?), some reporting is factually accurate and draws correct conclusions when approached by the specific type of bias with which you read the media.
It would have been different because someone else was blaming "The Media", but other than that, probably not.
How about this: some of the documents were an insanely bad forgery. Humorously bad. They were easily recreated in Microsoft Word with the default settings. No settings need to be changed - the default margins, tab-stops, and font all matched up perfectly. Pixel-perfectly.
Some people have suggested that it might be possible to duplicate the memos on equipment available at the time. Well, it's 100% possible to duplicate the memos using Word without changing any settings, to a pixel-perfect degree. Which is more likely?
Even if the documents were true, they were so obviously fake that there's just no way any journalist with integrity could possibly accept them as legit. They may indeed be copies of real reports, but they were obviously not originals.
And when this was pointed out (because it was so freaking obvious), CBS refused to back down on the story, insisting that the documents were real primary sources. Well - they weren't. And now CBS is paying the price for admitting that they made a mistake.
Yeah, it is kinda sad that it took this long for CBS to finally take action on that story. But even if you do support the Democrats, there's no way you should be able to support CBS's action. Nothing Fox News has done has come anywhere near this. There's a difference between being biased in reporting (which both arguably are) and using obviously false sources as primary sources.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Rather apparently had little to do with the initial story, but his behavior over the next two weeks was -- journalistically -- abhorrent, and that is worse than anything he did beforehand.
As to what he did beforehand, I am not sure specifically, but he was involved at least in following the story, encouraging it, etc. Of course, interviewing and such. But Mapes did all the real work.
I remember Whitewater. Remember that? The media had a field day with that. The Clintons didn't do a damn thing wrong there. They lost money on that. That dragged on for years. The media just repeated whatever the Republicans said. (To be fair, they would then immediately go and repeat what the Democrats said. But the media is not supposed to be a fucking megaphone.) The investigation was quietly closed in 2000 with no evidence of wrongdoing on their part.
I can see how the same isn't being done to Bush for the insane claptrap he's been spewing since he got into office. I'm not even talking about the election crap he pulled, and the media should have called him on. (They did the same uncritical megaphone crap during the election, though.)
I'm talking about Iraq, mostly, here. Where are the hard questions? Where were the hard questions about the lack of WMDs? Are they too afraid of losing their white house press pass or something?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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
Careful readers would realize I did not insist any such thing. I insisted that the journalists fall more on the left than the right, not that this results in significant journalistic bias. There's a big difference.
And this is a classic right-wing propaganda technique. If you can muddy an argument that is not winnable on your side so that it becomes a draw, then you deny the other side a victory, which is just as important as winning it in the first place.
Saying that "more journalists fall on the left than right" is implying that since the majority of journalists are 'liberals', then the media at large must also be 'liberal'. Have you ever considered that these journalists who have been polled and said they "vote Democrat" did so because they know that Republicans love to take away free speech protections? Just look at USA-PATRIOT and "Free Speech Zones". They are two more links in the chain of American Fascism.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
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.
Your quote of my post:
... The former of which has never resulted in anyone losing their right to free speech, ...
Saying that "more journalists fall on the left than right" is implying that since the majority of journalists are 'liberals'
What I actually said:
Saying that "more journalists fall on the left than right" is implying that since the majority of journalists are 'liberals', then the media at large must also be 'liberal'.
This falls into the same propaganda technique I stated earlier, a part of which is misquoting people to make their arguments sound ridiculous. The way in which you quoted me combined with the quick scanning most people do of forum comments would, of course, make me look "sad", which seems to be how you want anyone who disagrees with you to look. Here is what I should have said (hopefully this removes all those pesky shades of gray that you seem to not be able to handle):
Saying that "more journalists fall on the left than right" implies that the media at large has a liberal bias.
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(Referring to the USA PATRIOT Act)
Saying that the PATRIOT Act has not silenced free speech ignores this: anyone locked up in prison (normally) can still communicate to the outside world, and their Constitutional rights are still intact. I doubt you have met anyone who was kidnapped by a provision of the PATRIOT Act and lived to tell about it. The people locked up in the name of "terror" may very well be ones who chose to speak out for/against something. This would seem to be a curtailing of free speech rights.
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You, sir, are sad.
And here we have a classic example of an ad hominem attack.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?