CBS' COWARDICE AND CONFLICTS BEHIND PURGE By Greg Palast

[PennyMan]

Did Bush get special treatment to get into the Guard

"Independent" my ass. CBS' cowardly purge of five journalists who exposed George Bush's dodging of the Vietnam War draft was done under cover of what the network laughably called an "Independent Review Panel."

The "panel" was just two guys as qualified for the job as they are for landing the space shuttle: Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi.

Remember Dickie Thornburgh? He was on the Bush 41 Administration's payroll. His grand accomplishment as Bush's Attorney General was to whitewash the investigation of the Exxon Valdez Oil spill, letting the oil giant off the hook on big damages. Thornburgh's fat pay as counsel to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, the Washington law-and-lobbying outfit, is substantially due to his job as a Bush retainer. This is the kind of stinky conflict of interest that hardly suggests "independent." Why not just appoint Karl Rove as CBS' grand inquisitor and be done with it?


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[imenja]

1. Did you look at those documents?

It was obvious they were written with a word processor. It was clearly stupid of them to use those documents. They didn't need them. Are you really advocating that CBS should become as unconcerned with the rigor of it's reporting as Fox is?
The CBS report did more to hurt the Kerry campaign than Bush. One of those producers was so stupid as to let a source use her to get him an interview with the campaign.
This is not the sort of thing we need to be defending. It damaged the Kerry campaign. It did not help us.

[Gyre]

3. The truth of the claim

is what is important. The GOP managed to get everybody to all of a sudden develop a journalistic conscience (after all the loose bodies getting "inbedded" in Iraq) when EVERYBODY KNOWS that the chimp is a lying little draft dodger who reminds everybody who'll listen about 9/11 (his only claim to certainly not fame).

Seems to me the administration here did to CBS exactly what was done to the BBC in the context of their reporing on David Kelly (who conveniently had suicide committed upon him). Obviously a setup.

Why won't the major media grow some and tell that ignorant group of thralls in the red states that the issues are: 1) Is the chimp a draft dodger? And 2) Was CBS setup and by who?

This effin country amazes me.

Gyre

[imenja]

4. the problem is

If you want anyone to believe a news report other than yourself and people who think just like you, it needs to be put together with convincing evidence. The shoddy way they through together the report served to undermine and distract from the truth of the claim. The whole issue became CBS and Rather, because they used a clearly fraudulent memo. If they would have stuck to material they could verify, they could have produced a useful report that would have had a far greater impact on the Bush campaign. As it fell out, it was Kerry who was hurt by the mess. Those reporters deserved sanctioning for their role in the mess. If CBS wants to fire them, it doesn't bother me. Sloppy reporting serves no one.
Now, I also believe Judith Miller and Novak should have been fired a very long time ago. But their negligence doesn't nullify what 60 Minutes II did.

[saracat]

5. Did you even read the palast piece?

You seem to just be ranting the same old tied info. Palast makes some very good ponits about that info. And it was proven that those docs WERE NOT done on a word processor. They even know what kind od typewriter it was. I am not going to dig back to find the posts but they were right on DU. Dan Rather and company were the last of the real journalists. Now there is truly nothing!

[imenja]

6. I read it

and he doesn't like the people who served on the commission. I don't really care. I'm a historian. I've read thousands of documents in my lifetime. I know what letters from the 1960s and 1970s look like, and that one isn't. You could now go to the state department website and search for a pdf file of any document from that time period. You will see a very clearly difference in type.
Further, the very document experts CBS used to verify the documents told the reporters they had serious concerns about their authenticity.

The Palast article makes a rather blatant misstatement here: "
CBS did not "break" this Chicken-Hawk George story; it's just that Dan Rather, with Mapes' encouragement, found his journalistic soul and the cojones, finally, after 5 years delay, to report it. Did Bush get special treatment to get into the Guard? Baby Bush tested in the 25th percentile out of 100. Yet, he leaped ahead of thousands of other Vietnam evaders because the then-Speaker of the Texas legislature sent a message to General Craig Rose, head of the Guard, to let in Little George and a few other sons of well-placed politicos."
This ignores the solid reporting done in the Boston Globe in the days preceding the CBS story. CBS had no more "cojones" than the Boston Globe. Instead, they sought to up the stakes by showing on air a document they had received through a long time adversary of Bush's. They thus knocked a story based on good, solid reporting out of public discussion. Determined to one-up the competition, their carelessness came to be the focus of television media and eclipsed the good reporting that had just been done on the matter.

I find it a great concern that people believe something simply because they want it to be true. As I teach my students, critical thinking is essential. I don't believe something simply because it affirms a political message that is convenient to me. We wonder why Republicans so easily believe what Bush tells them. Today, no one cares about critically examining information. Truth has been replaced by that witch which we agree.

By the way, Rather was not fired. He is on 60 minutes II. If we are to believe him, his stepping down from the anchor chair is not related to this incident. Naturally, I find that pretty difficult to believe.

[Ms. Clio]

2. Really important piece

Palast writes:

"I would note that neither CBS nor the New York Times punished a single reporter for passing on, as hard news, the Bush Administration fibs and whoppers about Saddam Hussein's nuclear and biological weapons programs. Shameful repetitions of propaganda produced no resignations -- indeed, picked up an Emmy or two."


If anyone's head should be on a stake, it's Judith Miller.

[oppositionmember]

7. Honest mistakes should be recognized and forgiven

and I believe the CBS team made an honest mistake though exercising bad judgment. This is different than misrepresentation and outright lying which is standard practice on Fox, for instance. But when was the last time Fox was raked over the coals nationally for its mendaciousness?