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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.
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"
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.
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 newssource of yours does "respect the truth?" Not even our venerable /. can make that outrageous a claim.
BTW, I think it's (not "its") "Chicken Shit" of you to post A.C...
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
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
... 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.