I don’t know about you, but I’m loving the infighting going on at CBS. The insidous leftist bent has finally caught up with the old dinosaurs in real-time, and I’m enjoying every hour of it. 
Everybody’s trying to put the blame on somebody else. And Dan Rather had to be forced to admit the documents might be fakes, but he still hasn’t said this:
“It is true. I don’t like George Bush and I wanted to send him back to Texas. I knew the documents were questionable, but in my zeal, I resorted to dirty tricks. I’m so ashamed for presenting to the American public forged documents. I have no excuse. Although my career ended decades ago, I’m still trying to hold on to a remnant of the past: The domination of my beloved leftist media. We had a good run, didn’t we boys? Anyway…America, I humbly beg your forgiveness.”
You think? Let’s go to the story:
A war of words has erupted within the halls of “60 Minutes” following Dan Rather’s admission that CBS News aired a report on President Bush using questionable documents.On one side of the battle is Steve Kroft, a veteran correspondent on the Sunday edition of “60 Minutes.” On the other is Don Hewitt, founder of the pioneering newsmagazine.
Kroft argues it’s unlikely the Sunday show would have made the mistake of using the documents that bolstered Rather’s report – which aired on the Wednesday telecast, formerly known as “60 Minutes II.”
So much so, Kroft and staffers on the Sunday telecast want it to be clear — they weren’t the ones that were duped.
Too little, too late, Kroft. I don’t know about you, but I’m not letting the network wiggle off the hook that easily. If it hadn’t been Dan Rather, some other “journalist” at CBS would’ve picked it up. You can make book on that.
In another delightful story, we read:
Across the country, CBS affiliates continued to be bombarded with mail from viewers expressing their outrage over Dan Rather in particular and the journalistic debacle in general. Affiliate board is sure to take up the subject at its next meeting, set for Oct. 5.“Some people broke the cardinal rule and screwed us all,” one “60 Minutes” veteran said Tuesday.
I’ll concede. That local affiliates have to reap what Rather has sown is unfair, but Rather is getting what he deserves. Unfortunately, his colleagues have to suffer, the same way we’ve suffered his transparent liberal bias all these years. Such is life!
Throughout the day, CBS News prexy Andrew Heyward [who should be fired] and others worked to appoint members to an independent review panel that will dissect the circumstances leading to the decision to air documents pertaining to President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard….So far, no one at CBS News has been fired. Industryites don’t believe Rather will resign over the flap, but they concede the final chapter is far from written.
I don’t know about you, but I think bloggers have already written it.
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Allahpundit post a funny pic of Dan Rather. More on the independent panel at Wizbang.
Malkin mentions an interesting e-mail auction. Check out Bainbridge’s comment.
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CBS is going to have an ‘investigation’ but it’s just an academic exercise. They’re not going to confront the real issue — that the journalism profession has become so pervasively left-wing that none of the top news organizations are capable of reporting objectively. This CBS News producer made no bones about her politics, apparently, and the higher-ups not only didn’t mind they put her on assignment to ‘get’ President Bush.
Proverbs 24:17-18
Not to be moralising. But none of us, I think, wants the pressure to be let up so soon.
“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,
And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;
Lest the LORD see it, and it displease Him,
And He turn away His wrath from him.”
I stand convicted.
Hey, La Shawn: love your blog. Found you from allahpoundit. I read down through a couple of pages, and you’re clearly very articulate and very intelligent. I assume that you’re “educated,” but that has become a misnomer today anyway, so I stopped considering that before I even got out of college.
As for the local affiliates, I’m sorry for them, but the fact is that every time I’ve seen a local CBS affiliate’s news broadcast in numerous towns across the land, they all seem to have been “toeing the line” along with their liberal colleagues in NYC. I think it’s time they felt a little sting. I don’t think that this little debacle/victory (depends on your point of view) will bring down CBS or any of the affiliates; I doubt anyone will lose a job that they can’t afford to lose. But a little sting as a reminder that the people are actually watching, and not just eating their spoon-fed crap without consideration, will bring about some thought about changing their ways.
All of that having been said, I doubt that we will ever completely eradicate the bias that is out there without actually shaking these guys to their core. That, unfortunately, will mean basically bringing these guys to their knees. Sounds easy enough, but it means more than a few short-term activists; the American people will have to become so incensed that they will, en masse, flat-out refuse to watch any of the “big three” for quite some time.
The day that comes will be a great one, but I’m not holding my breath that it will happen in my lifetime.
Keep up the good work! I’ll be watching your blog from now on!
I guess I get by. Thanks for visiting, Adam. Do come again…
LaShawn, you shouldn’t feel too guilty about the schadenfreude over CBS. For one thing, they haven’t really fully admitted their wrongdoing in this case. (Check out Powerline, whose been a Blogosphere clearinghouse on the story.)
Numerous leftists are still trying to spin the fact that the memos are forged with variants on the NY Times story from about a week ago – that the memos were “fake but accurate” (yes, the NY Times actually used that oxymoronic phrase). It’s the Tawana Brawley defense all over again.
If CBS handled this correctly, they could have saved their reputation and news operation.
All they had to do was first suspend Rather, then apologize, and then investigate. Then make changes.
I saw a report on Fox News tonight that outlined problems Ms. Mapes had with the Colorado Bureau of Prisons a few years ago. She apparently had a quid pro quo with one prisoner to have him deliver a letter to her, then she in turn would get the letter to another prisoner in this maximum security lockup. The quid pro quo was the story itself. She wanted the story so badly she was willing to violate the the prison’s rules that were meant to protect the staff and ultimately the public. The warden apparently got all of this on audiotape and sent a memo to CBS about this and revoked all visitation privileges for her and CBS.
All that’s to say that this type of conduct could be much more pervasive than the mainstream media is willing to admit.
Does anyone really think that the ops at NBC and ABC are pristine? ABC is the network that did a hatchet job on Jesus a while back (a Peter Jennings report) using the discredited scholarship of the Jesus seminar. Jennings passed them off as reputable scholars when they are anything but serious scholars. NBC is the network that rigged the gas tanks on cars to ensure that the viewing public would “know” that the auto industry was building unsafe vehicles.
This goes on all the time. We’re just seeing some of it now.
RatherGate!!! Below is a NewsMax.com article that says CBS steered the forged document source to the Kerry Campaign!!!
(www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/9/20/225421.shtml)
With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
For the story behind the story…
Monday, Sept. 20, 2004 10:52 p.m. EDT
CBS Steered Forged Doc Source to Kerry Campaign
In what may be the most damaging revelation yet in the Rathergate document scandal, CBS News is admitting that it steered the source of forged military records damaging to President Bush to the Kerry campaign.
In exchange for the meeting with Kerry communications director Joe Lockhart, that source – former National Guard Commander Bill Burkett – agreed to give CBS copies of the Bush records.
USA Today is set to report in Tuesday editions:
“Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a female producer talked to him about the “60 Minutes” program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett.”
“At Burkett’s request, we gave his [telephone] number to the campaign,” Betsy West, senior CBS News vice president, confessed to USA Today.
Late Monday, CBS said it was investigating the role of “60 Minutes” star producer Mary Mapes in setting up the contact between Burkett and Lockhart.
“The network’s effort to place Burkett in contact with a top Democratic official raises ethical questions about CBS’s handling of material potentially damaging to the Republican president in the midst of an election,” the paper said.
Aly Col�n, a news ethicist at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said the collusion between CBS and the Kerry campaign to damage President Bush “poses a real danger to the potential credibility of a news organization.”
The White House reacted sharply to the Lockhart development, with Communications Director Dan Bartlett complaining, “The fact that CBS News would coordinate with the most senior levels of Senator Kerry’s campaign to attack the president is a stunning and deeply troubling revelation.”
I have to agree with Phil – the news media in this country have become SO cut-throat in the past 20 years that they’re willing to do “whatever it takes” to make sure they get the big story – even if it means they become the big story themselves.
How about the two verse following?
Fret not because of evildoers, neither be envious of the wicked,
For there shall be no reward for the evil man; the lamp of the wicked shall be put out.
It seems like there’s some hope that Rather will resign.
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