More Responses to the CBSgate Coverup Whitewash Report

Glenn Garvin writes at the Miami Herald-Tribune, yesterday:

The independent panel that investigated CBS News' botched report on President Bush's National Guard service spent an exhaustive four months on the job, interviewing 62 witnesses and reviewing thousands of pages of scripts, notes, e-mails, military records and press releases. Unfortunately, it seems to have neglected to read its own report — otherwise, it would never have concluded that political bias played no role in the fiasco.

The evidence that reporters and producers working for CBS desperately wanted to land a knockout punch on the president's reelection campaign is right there in the panel's own 224-page review of how the Bush story went so grotesquely wrong.

They wanted it so much that they ignored evidence that their story was wrong, not only in its details but also in its fundamental assumptions. They wanted it so much that they slandered anyone who challenged them and plotted a book deal for a key source. They wanted it so much that they lied on the air and in their press releases. And they wanted it so much that even now, when the story has been disproved as a tissue of fictions and falsehoods, they continue to insist it's true....

Likewise, the independent panel would have done CBS an immense favor by advising the network to take a hard look at itself. Former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias, wrote that many newsrooms are locked in a collective groupthink that prevents them from noticing their political leanings any more than a fish notices water.

It's not that there's a morning meeting where reporters and editors sit down to conspire against Bush or Republicans; rather, because they overwhelmingly share the same liberal ideology, what strikes outsiders as political bias simply seems common sense to them. If ''everybody knows'' that Bush is a liar, a coward and a spoiled rich kid, there's no need to spend a lot of time proving it.

The independent panel came tantalizingly close to putting its finger on the problem when it said CBS pursued the Bush story with ''myopic zeal.'' But the panel attributed the myopia to competitive journalistic instincts, the drive to get a story first, rather than politics. After all, everybody knows there's no liberal bias in the news business.

And Debra Saunders writes at the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 13:

.... In 2000, Burkett had told an author and a blogger that he was sent to Panama as punishment for refusing to falsify records on Bush. Later he told the Houston Chronicle that wasn't accurate.

In 2000, Burkett also spread the story that he had overheard a conference call on a speakerphone between National Guard brass and staff for then-Gov. George W. Bush about "scrubbing" Bush documents. In 2004, Burkett added a new twist when he told the Dallas Morning News that he saw Bush documents in a waste can.

Think about his story: Guard brass and the Bushies were so dumb they left a door open during a speakerphone conference call as they planned a cover-up, and instead of shredding or burning the documents, they threw them in the trash. Somehow, none of those documents made the papers during the 2000 election. God works in mysterious ways.

When Mapes and a colleague met with Burkett, he didn't hand them a smoking gun from the scrubbed documents. No, in a new twist, he handed them copies of documents written by a dead guy, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian.

Documents from a dead guy, not the official papers that first interested them — and Mapes and company still believed. Talk about faith.

Burkett gave different explanations as to how he got the documents. No problem-o. All four experts hired to authenticate the documents refused to do so, although one authenticated Killian's signature. Two, however, warned that the documents had big problems. Mapes ignored them. She only saw her Holy Grail....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 01/17/05 07:39:32 AM
Categorized as Media.