Interesting stuff at Little Green Footballs on the Rathergate stuff. Here are some interesting bits of info on this:
1. Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer, was "quite liberal" and disliked the current President (Bush). here
2. The Dems are starting to spin it. here
3. The real provider of the memos is Lucy Ramirez, not Conn, as Burkett originally stated. here
Can anyone believe any of this stuff? Burkett keeps changing his story, he says he copied the originals and then burned them because he was afraid. If this is true, that means CBS never had the originals. Would you go with this serious a story without the originals? You would if you were biased and trying to infulence an election.
Check out Dan Rather's apology here. These "mistakes in judgement" do not appear to be "in good faith", in my humble opinion.
Update: Check out Communists for Kerry and their investigation on CBS bias.
Further Update: Great post at Let it Bleed comparing the Rathergate flip-flop in the blogsphere to others in history and fiction.
Further Further Update: Timeline of Rathergate can be found here. Thanks to PoliDock for this.
3 comments:
IMO "Rathergate" is no worse than the deceit and lies used to launch the Iraq war in the first place. If people are going to whine about dishonest reporting, then they should whine in all cases - not only those that happen to prop up their own political ideals.
(not pointing a finger at you - but pro-Bush/war blogs in general seem very myopic on details like this)
Andrew,
Thank you for your comment however, I cannot agree.
Firstly, my point is that CBS seems to be saying that they made a mistake, yet the evidence seems to point that they willfully made this mistake, or are else incompetent. You can make the same point about the Bush Administration regarding Iraq, and I would agree a case can be made for that.
However, this post is about journalistic integrity, not about Bush. Journalists are supposed to be non-partisan, while we know governments are not. If ABC presented the information about Iraq, then, possibly, the two situations could be compared.
CBS News is a (supposedly) non-partisan organization that is supposed to present facts to their viewers. They have been clearly caught, in my opinion, in very shoddy reporting and may have tried to fraudulently tried to influence the American public. These actions should be condemned by all, whether on the left or right. Remember, if the left can get away with it, then so can the right and I hazard to guess that, next time, the forgeries will not be so amateur.
mb,
My point is that all of the big American networks could have gone to the same lengths you demand from CBS in Rathergate in order to verify their evidence (for WMDs, ties to al quaeda, etc) leading up to the Iraq invasion. Instead they insisted on blindly reporting what the White House fed them and excluded all facts to the contrary. In the Iraq case it is so obvious because many media outlets in the rest of the world were screaming that the facts were inconsistent, fraudulent, or exaggerated.
Fox, CNN, etc (hell, probably CBS too) are all guilty of doing exactly what happened in Rathergate in the lead up to Iraq - i.e. pushing out a story without ample evidence that the facts they were given were solid.
It's wrong is ALL cases - just like you say. I never tried to claim otherwise.
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