Responses to the CBSgate Coverup Whitewash Report

The report is available here.

Jonathan Last has a couple of articles at The Weekly Standard:

• It's Worse Than You Thought
• Whitewash

The Power Liners, of course, have weighed in:

• Prove it!
• The Thornburgh Report: What It Says, and What It Doesn't Say

Here's a transcript of an interview with Hindrocket.

Here are some other bloggers' responses:

• Scylla & Charybdis: Texas Smoke and ……
• Roger L. Simon: Why Did Dick Thornburgh Lie?
• Michelle Malkin: The Mapes-Hackworth-Memogate-Abu Ghraib Connection
• Captain's Quarters: The Perils Of Advocacy Journalism And The Case For CBS' Bias

Don't miss these Cox & Forkum cartoons.

Finally, Tony Blankley provides an informative perspective at WaTi, Jan. 12:

.... The two greatest dangers to CBS coming out of the September 8 broadcast were that it would be found that they: 1) knowingly broadcast fraudulent Defense Department documents, and 2) were motivated to do so because they are biased against George Bush and the Republican Party.

And it was on those two vital points that the Thornburgh Report failed to come to a conclusion. The report's concession of bad journalism merely conceded the undeniable. That fact had been apparent to most of the public and virtually all of the major news outlets by about September 10. Conceding bad journalism was merely a belated bow to undeniable reality. They couldn't possibly have conceded less than they did.

But the "Independent Panel" provided one more service to CBS. It showed the report to CBS executives before it released it to the public. Thus CBS was given a public-relations crises management expert's dream — the extraordinarily valuable opportunity of simultaneously announcing the report's findings and CBS's corporate response to the findings — which was to fire key executives and producers below Mr. Rather.

Thus, there was no headline this week stating that CBS admits documents were a fraud or caused by partisan bias. Instead, the headlines in papers as diverse as The New York Times, The Washington Times and The Washington Post were all the same: CBS fires 4. That headline was followed by the finding that CBS's journalistic standards had been deficient. As they say — that's old news.

The crisis has been defused. The damage has been limited. Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP have earned every last penny of the undoubtedly huge legal/PR bill that is now, presumably, in the mail to CBS.

Did CBS dodge a bullet? Not yet, they haven't. But the folks in mainstream media have been put on notice, again: the days are gone when they can rush something like this out the door and count on (1) almost nobody being able to dissect and analyze it quickly and (2) those who do dissect and analyze such things being unable to get their opinions seen & heard by a wide audience outside the control of mainstream media.

BTW... if the memos were not fake, why was there any need to fire anybody?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 01/13/05 05:50:03 PM
Categorized as Media.