LOL. Just like a liberal. The text editor does precisely what most people expect it to do, and the behavior is wrong because a minority of people want it to do something relatively unexpected.
Bah, indeed. I've spent a lot more time in Emacs trying to fix line indents than I have in BBEdit doing the same (and I have spent a lot more time using BBEdit over the years).
Emacs-style line indenting is great when it works, but often it gets it wrong, to the point where I much prefer how BBEdit does it.
This all starts, usually, with someone on the right crying about pervasive liberal bias, using the twin arguments of evidence of political leanings, and anecdotal examples of its expression as bias in a story.
There are many ways to argue against those claims, but most of them involve, in some fashion, either arguing against or dismissing the claims of leftward political leanings. And either way, you end up hurting your own argument by denying the fact.
If the goal is to either get at the truth or to even win the argument, it's best to concede the fact that most of them are liberal, and then move on to dismissing the charge of bias in the media.
So it does have an impact, in my view, but not on whether or not there is liberal bias, but in how that claim is argued.
Of course, DavidTC and others would rather lie to you about my motives, which are not in the least bit partisan in this regard, as I've been a journalist longer than I've been a "right-winger" (about 15 years), and most of the time, I argue these points against right-wingers, rather than against leftists.
Both sides of this argument end up missing the point dramatically, and it's sad. The right used to be the more sad, as it claimed liberal bias behind anything that happened. But the left, surpassing my wildest expectations, took the cake when it started claiming the media had a conservative bias.
[What's tragically comic here is that the left uses the same stupid arguments the right used in the 90s: trying to prove their case by using (often weak, as in the person who compared Cameron's unintentional publication on foxnews.com which was immediately retracted to Mapes' intentional fake story that she still stands by) anecdotal evidence, and ignoring the counterevidence and reasonable explanations. It's similar to how the Bush-haters of today have the same insane myopia that the Clinton-haters had in the 90s: everything Clinton/Bush says or does is bad, because he is evil, and I stands for all that is wrong with this country. It's extreme foolishness, and it saddens me that the left didn't learn from the mistakes of the right. But I digress.]
Yes, daytime talk radio is on the right (though in my experience, evenings are on the left... maybe that's just where I've been, though). And Fox News certainly is, as is the Washington Times, to some degree. But most major newspapers (NY Times, WaPo, LA Times, Boston Globe are the ones I am most familiar with) are pretty far left, and the other major news networks are at best slightly leftward (I personally put CBS and ABC on the left, CNN and NBC slightly closer to center).
I have no problem with any of this, as long as the news reporting is reasonably objective. When I was living in SoCal, the LA Times was notoriously bad at this, and had a very distinct liberal slant. I've heard its gotten better. The Boston Globe, when I lived there, was pretty bad at times (most notably recently in their reporting of Rathergate itself, which was almost as bad as Mapes was). I've been pleasantly surprised by the Seattle Times, now that I live in WA. I think they do a good job of being objective in their news reporting, but I still have no doubts about their political leanings. The New York Times has had its own well-publicized problems on this front.
All these examples are just by way of saying the leanings are often clear, but that doesn't mean there is a bias in the reporting. The Globe is just riddled with bias, as is Fox News, but the Seattle Times is not, and neither is NBC (in my estimation), even though the leanings of their staff are often just as apparent. To have a real discussion about bias, you have to first get past the fact that people -- including journalists -- do have political leanings, and with journalists, they are more often to the left. Once you can move past it, accept it as reality, you can then have a more reasonable discussion about how bias creeps into reporting.
As you can clearly see, your assertion that this is a text file was incorrect, as SEE is telling the OS that it is not.
The simple answer, if you wish to continue using SEE as your default for that file type, is to set TextWrangler to open any file by default, instead of only text files, as noted previously.
So it looks like it has no file type, unless I look at it in the Finder or somesuch, where I see it has a BBEdit document icon, and a Get Info shows "Kind: HTML file" and "Open with: BBEdit".
Try both, and see what they say. Chances are it is either an unknown type, or it is known as a different, non-text, type.
Either way, you can modify it in Get Info by changing to "Open with: TextWrangler" and then click "Change All..." to make that change permanent for all files with the ".php" suffix. Or, in TextWrangler, you can modify the options right there to open any files, not just text files (see the "Enable:" popup list in the file dialog, select "All Files"; you can make this the default, too, I believe).
I cant open my.php files with Text Wrangler though.
I can. I did. I don't think you even tried it.
When I open a.php file in TextWrangler, it shows as HTML, which is reasonable as a default (the HTML mode recognizes PHP code, but also HTML In addition). Others may prefer plain PHP syntax coloring instead, and you may modify that in your preferences (under "Languages").
last i checked,.php files were 'text', so this program should be able to open it at least without color coding it..????
If you think it cannot, you're obviously mistaken.
Saying that "more journalists fall on the left than right" is implying that since the majority of journalists are 'liberals'
Not implying, stating.
then the media at large must also be 'liberal'.
No. In fact, I stated the opposite, that there personal bias is usually not a significant factor. You're reading something into what I wrote that it is not there.
It is stupid to ignore the fact that most journalists are liberals. But that doesn't mean there is a significant or pervasive liberal bias in the media.
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?
I would not consider such a ridiculous thing, no.
Just look at USA-PATRIOT and "Free Speech Zones".
The former of which has never resulted in anyone losing their right to free speech, and the latter which was first implemented on a large scale by the Democratically-controlled city of Boston, at the Democratic National Convention. Ummm, yeah.
Yes, those words were not related to the forged memos. They referenced British intel, which we know was not based on those memos. Sorry YOU didn't know that.
So. Barnes was elected by the people of Texas as the Democratic Lt. Governor because he helped out Bush? Keep digging!
When Barnes was the speaker of the House, Bush was the only Republican even IN the Texas Congressional delegation, and only one Republican state Senator, and only a few Republican state House members.
Barnes was running for election before he called on behalf of Bush, and he was a shoo-in to win because he was the Democratic candidate, and the Democrats won all statewide offices at that time.
You're just making it all up.
Since Barnes has confessed, until there's similarly credible denial of his story, it's incriminating.
How about Barnes himself, denying it? He said to Rather, "Well, Sid Adger, and not the Bush family came to see me, to ask me to get-- President Bush-- George W. Bush into the National Guard, which I made the call to Gen. Rose. And he was accepted. Whether he was accepted solely because of my call, I do not know."
What is more accurate, judging from the rest of the transcript, is that he does not know if he was accepted even in PART because of Barnes' call. He said he was assuming that was the case, and never got any feedback that said his call made a difference.
I'd say that this question, since it seems to continue to burn so brightly on especially the Republican agenda (as a "fraud"), should be decided by a judge
Um, except, no laws are even ALLEGED to have been violated in this matter.
The Niger forgeries had little if anything to do with the decision to go to war. They were not known by (at least most of) Congress when they authorized war, and they were uncovered as forgeries before the war began.
Also, they were never mentioned by Bush (who, INSTEAD of referencing these memos, referenced British intel, which was based on something else) or Powell (who excluded that information from his speech to the UN because it was too questionable).
Also, again, Barnes was a DEMOCRAT who told Dan Rather he did NOT know if Bush got any preferential treatment (that is, he did not know if his call to the ANG had any influence over the decision to accept him).
How about just making up a statement by Kerry and reporting it as news? [guardian.co.uk]
Oh jeez, get a life. Cameron did that as an offhanded joke, it was not intended for publication, and they immediately apologized. You think this is remotely similar to spending months on a fake story, and then vigorously defending it for two weeks?
The panel's scope was limited to looking at the existing evidence and determining what the journalists did wrong. So they cannot say the documents were forged, they can only say there was not enough evidence supporting them to justify their use, etc.
Their job was to say how well the journalists acted, and their conclusion was "poorly."
That said, they did note all through their report that many statements in the CBS stories were "not accurate" or "inaccurate" and such, and several other parts of the story would said to be in "error" and not "fair," and it's not at all misleading to say the report found the story to be inaccurate, unfair, and erroneous.
As to your discussion of fonts, no one has produced a typewriter that could produce that document, and yet we have produced a computer program that by default prints that document perfectly (when combined with a certain printer). Until you can produce this typewriter, Occam's Razor governs.
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.
I don't know what "too" cautious is to your mind, but if it means "a lot more cautious than they are now," then I hope it certainly does have this effect. Woodward and Bernstein and their editors were extremely cautious, far moreso than Mapes and Rather.
The 9/11 inquiry cost $15e6, and was carefully held short.
No, it wasn't.
Consider how *often* we heard about blue dresses in the news, and how reports of faulty intelligence on Iraq came and went.
This is just stupid. Really stupid.
A Democratic attorney general tells Ken Starr to include this in his investigation. It's his job to prosecute the case, so he does the best job he can do. And this is all big news, because almost everyone wanted to know about it. Most news -- for good or ill -- is focused on or not because of public interest (witness the Kobe Bryant trial). To say a President who lied under oath about an affair with an intern he has in the Oval Office is a big story only because of non-liberal, or even conservative, bias ignores the fact that the first bias of media is to get the big story that everyone will read/watch/listen to.
And the on the other hand we have WMD, and your ridiculous claim that "reports of faulty intelligence on Iraq came and went." This was the top story of the last year. It was one of Kerry's main campaign themes, it was the reason a CIA head left, it was the main theme of the most well-reported-on bill in Congress last year.
It's called 'The Big Lie'. Just keep insisting there's a liberal bias in the media. Facts don't matter.
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.
No, it was not. Check again. He specifically said he did not know if Bush got preferential treatment. As the CBS report this week said, "Barnes stated, however, that he did not know if his call to a TexANG official back in 1968 made any difference with respect to President Bush."
then Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor
No, he was last year the Democrat Texas Lt. Governor, and campaigned heavily for Kerry at the time he gave CBS the interview. At the time, he was the Democratic speaker of the Texas house.
And others corroborated the eyewitess accounts of more recent destruction of records, like record books in trash cans.
The only person who said he saw records in trash cans was Burkett, the guy who supplied the forged documents, so sorry, that's just not credible.
The story is plain as day
Republican (except really Democrat) Barnes said Bush got preferential treatment (except he didn't say that) and Burkett said he saw records in trash cans (except he is entirely unreliable).
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.
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.
No, it wasn't.
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.
First, this was not in the original story, but part of the followup story they used to help show the original was accurate. Second, this is not verification, this is assertion, by exactly one person, who at best was reporting hearsay, as she was not a witness to any preferential treatment.
Others party to Bush's favorable treatment also gave their eyewitness accounts, corroborating the story.
No. No one else did.
The established facts are that Bush was skipped out of the Vietnam draft as a favor to his powerful Texas politician father.
You are quite mistaken. There is no evidence that he got preferential treatment, and the CBS story excluded quotes from officials in the ANG at the time who said he did not get preferential treatment.
We don't know where the documents originally came from, last I saw (I've not read the whole report). Burkett says he got them from someone, but won't say whom. And Burkett maintains he thinks they are real.
I won't defend McCain on his bogus election reform efforts. I just think that if you're gonna start bumping long-term incumbents, he shouldn't be at the top of the list, because one of my main interests in getting rid of incumbents relates to pork.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL. Just like a liberal. The text editor does precisely what most people expect it to do, and the behavior is wrong because a minority of people want it to do something relatively unexpected.
Bah, indeed. I've spent a lot more time in Emacs trying to fix line indents than I have in BBEdit doing the same (and I have spent a lot more time using BBEdit over the years).
Emacs-style line indenting is great when it works, but often it gets it wrong, to the point where I much prefer how BBEdit does it.
It's not complicated.
... maybe that's just where I've been, though). And Fox News certainly is, as is the Washington Times, to some degree. But most major newspapers (NY Times, WaPo, LA Times, Boston Globe are the ones I am most familiar with) are pretty far left, and the other major news networks are at best slightly leftward (I personally put CBS and ABC on the left, CNN and NBC slightly closer to center).
This all starts, usually, with someone on the right crying about pervasive liberal bias, using the twin arguments of evidence of political leanings, and anecdotal examples of its expression as bias in a story.
There are many ways to argue against those claims, but most of them involve, in some fashion, either arguing against or dismissing the claims of leftward political leanings. And either way, you end up hurting your own argument by denying the fact.
If the goal is to either get at the truth or to even win the argument, it's best to concede the fact that most of them are liberal, and then move on to dismissing the charge of bias in the media.
So it does have an impact, in my view, but not on whether or not there is liberal bias, but in how that claim is argued.
Of course, DavidTC and others would rather lie to you about my motives, which are not in the least bit partisan in this regard, as I've been a journalist longer than I've been a "right-winger" (about 15 years), and most of the time, I argue these points against right-wingers, rather than against leftists.
Both sides of this argument end up missing the point dramatically, and it's sad. The right used to be the more sad, as it claimed liberal bias behind anything that happened. But the left, surpassing my wildest expectations, took the cake when it started claiming the media had a conservative bias.
[What's tragically comic here is that the left uses the same stupid arguments the right used in the 90s: trying to prove their case by using (often weak, as in the person who compared Cameron's unintentional publication on foxnews.com which was immediately retracted to Mapes' intentional fake story that she still stands by) anecdotal evidence, and ignoring the counterevidence and reasonable explanations. It's similar to how the Bush-haters of today have the same insane myopia that the Clinton-haters had in the 90s: everything Clinton/Bush says or does is bad, because he is evil, and I stands for all that is wrong with this country. It's extreme foolishness, and it saddens me that the left didn't learn from the mistakes of the right. But I digress.]
Yes, daytime talk radio is on the right (though in my experience, evenings are on the left
I have no problem with any of this, as long as the news reporting is reasonably objective. When I was living in SoCal, the LA Times was notoriously bad at this, and had a very distinct liberal slant. I've heard its gotten better. The Boston Globe, when I lived there, was pretty bad at times (most notably recently in their reporting of Rathergate itself, which was almost as bad as Mapes was). I've been pleasantly surprised by the Seattle Times, now that I live in WA. I think they do a good job of being objective in their news reporting, but I still have no doubts about their political leanings. The New York Times has had its own well-publicized problems on this front.
All these examples are just by way of saying the leanings are often clear, but that doesn't mean there is a bias in the reporting. The Globe is just riddled with bias, as is Fox News, but the Seattle Times is not, and neither is NBC (in my estimation), even though the leanings of their staff are often just as apparent. To have a real discussion about bias, you have to first get past the fact that people -- including journalists -- do have political leanings, and with journalists, they are more often to the left. Once you can move past it, accept it as reality, you can then have a more reasonable discussion about how bias creeps into reporting.
Why did you write this reply to my comment about McCain, when it is apparently unrelated to what I wrote?
The simple answer, if you wish to continue using SEE as your default for that file type, is to set TextWrangler to open any file by default, instead of only text files, as noted previously.
The old way:So it looks like it has no file type, unless I look at it in the Finder or somesuch, where I see it has a BBEdit document icon, and a Get Info shows "Kind: HTML file" and "Open with: BBEdit".
Try both, and see what they say. Chances are it is either an unknown type, or it is known as a different, non-text, type.
Either way, you can modify it in Get Info by changing to "Open with: TextWrangler" and then click "Change All..." to make that change permanent for all files with the ".php" suffix. Or, in TextWrangler, you can modify the options right there to open any files, not just text files (see the "Enable:" popup list in the file dialog, select "All Files"; you can make this the default, too, I believe).
I cant open my .php files with Text Wrangler though.
.php file in TextWrangler, it shows as HTML, which is reasonable as a default (the HTML mode recognizes PHP code, but also HTML In addition). Others may prefer plain PHP syntax coloring instead, and you may modify that in your preferences (under "Languages").
.php files were 'text', so this program should be able to open it at least without color coding it..????
I can. I did. I don't think you even tried it.
When I open a
last i checked,
If you think it cannot, you're obviously mistaken.
Saying that "more journalists fall on the left than right" is implying that since the majority of journalists are 'liberals'
Not implying, stating.
then the media at large must also be 'liberal'.
No. In fact, I stated the opposite, that there personal bias is usually not a significant factor. You're reading something into what I wrote that it is not there.
It is stupid to ignore the fact that most journalists are liberals. But that doesn't mean there is a significant or pervasive liberal bias in the media.
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?
I would not consider such a ridiculous thing, no.
Just look at USA-PATRIOT and "Free Speech Zones".
The former of which has never resulted in anyone losing their right to free speech, and the latter which was first implemented on a large scale by the Democratically-controlled city of Boston, at the Democratic National Convention. Ummm, yeah.
You, sir, are sad.
Yes, those words were not related to the forged memos. They referenced British intel, which we know was not based on those memos. Sorry YOU didn't know that.
So. Barnes was elected by the people of Texas as the Democratic Lt. Governor because he helped out Bush? Keep digging!
When Barnes was the speaker of the House, Bush was the only Republican even IN the Texas Congressional delegation, and only one Republican state Senator, and only a few Republican state House members.
Barnes was running for election before he called on behalf of Bush, and he was a shoo-in to win because he was the Democratic candidate, and the Democrats won all statewide offices at that time.
You're just making it all up.
Since Barnes has confessed, until there's similarly credible denial of his story, it's incriminating.
How about Barnes himself, denying it? He said to Rather, "Well, Sid Adger, and not the Bush family came to see me, to ask me to get-- President Bush-- George W. Bush into the National Guard, which I made the call to Gen. Rose. And he was accepted. Whether he was accepted solely because of my call, I do not know."
What is more accurate, judging from the rest of the transcript, is that he does not know if he was accepted even in PART because of Barnes' call. He said he was assuming that was the case, and never got any feedback that said his call made a difference.
I'd say that this question, since it seems to continue to burn so brightly on especially the Republican agenda (as a "fraud"), should be decided by a judge
Um, except, no laws are even ALLEGED to have been violated in this matter.
You're making everything up, and it's sad.
The Niger forgeries had little if anything to do with the decision to go to war. They were not known by (at least most of) Congress when they authorized war, and they were uncovered as forgeries before the war began.
Also, they were never mentioned by Bush (who, INSTEAD of referencing these memos, referenced British intel, which was based on something else) or Powell (who excluded that information from his speech to the UN because it was too questionable).
You really need to work on your facts/lies.
Also, again, Barnes was a DEMOCRAT who told Dan Rather he did NOT know if Bush got any preferential treatment (that is, he did not know if his call to the ANG had any influence over the decision to accept him).
How about just making up a statement by Kerry and reporting it as news? [guardian.co.uk]
Oh jeez, get a life. Cameron did that as an offhanded joke, it was not intended for publication, and they immediately apologized. You think this is remotely similar to spending months on a fake story, and then vigorously defending it for two weeks?
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.
The panel's scope was limited to looking at the existing evidence and determining what the journalists did wrong. So they cannot say the documents were forged, they can only say there was not enough evidence supporting them to justify their use, etc.
Their job was to say how well the journalists acted, and their conclusion was "poorly."
That said, they did note all through their report that many statements in the CBS stories were "not accurate" or "inaccurate" and such, and several other parts of the story would said to be in "error" and not "fair," and it's not at all misleading to say the report found the story to be inaccurate, unfair, and erroneous.
As to your discussion of fonts, no one has produced a typewriter that could produce that document, and yet we have produced a computer program that by default prints that document perfectly (when combined with a certain printer). Until you can produce this typewriter, Occam's Razor governs.
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.
I don't know what "too" cautious is to your mind, but if it means "a lot more cautious than they are now," then I hope it certainly does have this effect. Woodward and Bernstein and their editors were extremely cautious, far moreso than Mapes and Rather.
The 9/11 inquiry cost $15e6, and was carefully held short.
No, it wasn't.
Consider how *often* we heard about blue dresses in the news, and how reports of faulty intelligence on Iraq came and went.
This is just stupid. Really stupid.
A Democratic attorney general tells Ken Starr to include this in his investigation. It's his job to prosecute the case, so he does the best job he can do. And this is all big news, because almost everyone wanted to know about it. Most news -- for good or ill -- is focused on or not because of public interest (witness the Kobe Bryant trial). To say a President who lied under oath about an affair with an intern he has in the Oval Office is a big story only because of non-liberal, or even conservative, bias ignores the fact that the first bias of media is to get the big story that everyone will read/watch/listen to.
And the on the other hand we have WMD, and your ridiculous claim that "reports of faulty intelligence on Iraq came and went." This was the top story of the last year. It was one of Kerry's main campaign themes, it was the reason a CIA head left, it was the main theme of the most well-reported-on bill in Congress last year.
It's called 'The Big Lie'. Just keep insisting there's a liberal bias in the media. Facts don't matter.
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.
How is this obvious?
From the numerous surveys done over the past few decades, all of which show that a majority of journalists vote Democrat. This isn't difficult.
No, the story was also corroborated by Ben Barnes
No, it was not. Check again. He specifically said he did not know if Bush got preferential treatment. As the CBS report this week said, "Barnes stated, however, that he did not know if his call to a TexANG official back in 1968 made any difference with respect to President Bush."
then Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor
No, he was last year the Democrat Texas Lt. Governor, and campaigned heavily for Kerry at the time he gave CBS the interview. At the time, he was the Democratic speaker of the Texas house.
And others corroborated the eyewitess accounts of more recent destruction of records, like record books in trash cans.
The only person who said he saw records in trash cans was Burkett, the guy who supplied the forged documents, so sorry, that's just not credible.
The story is plain as day
Republican (except really Democrat) Barnes said Bush got preferential treatment (except he didn't say that) and Burkett said he saw records in trash cans (except he is entirely unreliable).
Your plain as day story doesn't wash.
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.
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.
No, it wasn't.
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.
First, this was not in the original story, but part of the followup story they used to help show the original was accurate. Second, this is not verification, this is assertion, by exactly one person, who at best was reporting hearsay, as she was not a witness to any preferential treatment.
Others party to Bush's favorable treatment also gave their eyewitness accounts, corroborating the story.
No. No one else did.
The established facts are that Bush was skipped out of the Vietnam draft as a favor to his powerful Texas politician father.
You are quite mistaken. There is no evidence that he got preferential treatment, and the CBS story excluded quotes from officials in the ANG at the time who said he did not get preferential treatment.
Sorry.
We don't know where the documents originally came from, last I saw (I've not read the whole report). Burkett says he got them from someone, but won't say whom. And Burkett maintains he thinks they are real.
I won't defend McCain on his bogus election reform efforts. I just think that if you're gonna start bumping long-term incumbents, he shouldn't be at the top of the list, because one of my main interests in getting rid of incumbents relates to pork.
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.