CBS Report On Rathergate ReleasedFollow

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Fox is alot less of a joke that CBS is right now. I don't think Fox has used forged documents 50 days outside an election with the agenda to bring down a Presidency.

Use any link to the story from any news source you want. I'm pretty sure Al-Jazeera probably has covered it.

What struck me immeidately were several factors:

1) Dan Rather >still< believes the story is accurate and the documents genuine. He also apparetly still believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.

2) That CBS refuses to believe that their news reporting has a definite bias and an agenda. They say that they can find no evidence of a bias. Well, if all the people I work with are white people, then chances are pretty good that I'll mirror their opinion set. If everyone around you is Liberal, then your opinion is almost certainly to be Liberal as well.

3) All four experts that 60 Minutes asked to examine the documents refused to authenticate them because they were copies, not originals, and that they all said that a definitive statement of authenticity could be given ONLY if the originals could be examined.

4) The producer that was fired (Mapes?) contacted Joe Lockhart- who was, at that time, a paid consultant for the Kerry campaign- to contact this Dan Burkette to arrange payment in return for the documents. So we have a Kerry staffer being asked to pay for documents so that an 'unbiased' news organization can take a shot at unseating the President of the US. No agenda there.

5) CBS admits that multiple in-house authentication processes weren't used in writing this story. Why? What effect would it have had if they spent an extra week, month- whatever- to properly vett the story? Could it possibly be that they desperately wanted the story to come out in timne to have a negative impact on Bushes' re-election? Remember, in 2000, Bushes' 30 year old drunk driving conviction was leaked to the press and reported literally the weekend before the election.

Anyone remember the old joke that goes, "What do you call ten dead lawyers at the bottom of a hole? A good start."? Well, the firing of these four is that- a good start- but they'll have to go alot further if they expect to regain any sort of credibility as a responsible and fair news organization.

I won't say Whitewash because some people were actually punished. But I'll also say they didn't go far enough. Head of CBS News Head Andrew Heyward should've gotten the axe. Dan Rather should be packed off the report the weather on Pocatello, Idaho's CBS affiliate. An on-air apology and admission of guilt would be nice too.

Yeah. It's hard to say whether political motivation was more powerful then simple pressure to get the story out first and get the most ratings from it. They're both still wrong, but different kinds of wrong.

Another problem I have with that though, is that it takes a significant amount of time to prep for those segments. It's not like they found the memo one day, and then did only a minimal check of the document so they could rush the segment to air. What happened is that they found the memo (bought it from an already known unreliable source actually), then they spent about several weeks gathering footage of discussion of the memo with relevant individuals (the above mentioned General included), then spent another week or two editing the footage so as to make a complete "story" out of it (only coincidentally insuring that all footage supports the memo of course!), and then they go to air.

My point is that while they were out gathering "supporing testimony" and editing it into a nice, viewable, and hopefully persuasive finished package, they had all the time in the world to verify the validity of the memo itself. They chose not to. It was as though once the decision was made to go forward with the story, the memo was simply assumed be be absolute truth from that point onward. In fact, we can see the ingrainment of that idea in the way CBS reacted to challenges to the memo's validity in the first place. They absolutely refused to even entertain the idea that the document they had based their entire story on could possibly be fake.

That's not just poor journalism, it's dangerous journalism. It's dangerous because of the methods commonly used in shows like that. You take a small piece of evidence (like a memo), and they use that as a centerpiece to build a story. You've all seen stories contructed like this. There's one piece of "truth" and a whole lot of edited footage placed around that truth that's specifically constructed to support it. Unfortunately, as I stated earlier, we don't get to cross examine edited footage. We don't even get to see *all* the footage used. It's ridiculously easy to edit content to make a case seem more powerful then it really is.

Take the General for example. He may have been shown a transcript of the memo. He may have said something like "If this is true, then ...", but when it's edited, all the viewers will see is the "..." part of the footage. This may not be a deliberate effort to lie by the journalists involved. It's just that in their mind the document is "true", so there's no point in adding the conditional statement, right? The end result to the viewer though is what appears to be a very strong case for something, and an appearance of a mountain of fact, when in actuality there is very little at the center of this tootsie pop.


I don't so much blame the journalists for trying to lie. I blame the very methodologies in our media that are used commonly. What passes for "investigative journalism" today is little more then starting with one vague bit of fact, and an intent to show that fact in a particular light, and a whole lot of editing to make it look like that view of the truth is "the truth". Journalism should not be about persuasion. It should be about presenting raw facts only. Journalists should be very careful about reaching any conclusions whether stated or implied in their work without being *absolutely* positive they are right. If their "evidence" wouldn't stand up in court, then they shouldn't be trying to draw any conclusions from them. Unfortunately, our media outlets do exactly that continously and as a matter of course in a standard news day. It's become so normal that the viewing public has come to accept it as the way news reporting is done.

And that's what's really dangerous IMO.

Ok. Analysis is fine. The problem though is that in most cases today, the "analysis" is done off the air and the "conclusions" are what's presented in the story. In the end, the viewers are presented with a story that's been packaged from start to finish to provide a persuasive case for the conclusion reached behind the scenes. Very rarely do we see counter information presented, or anything remotely resembling alternative viewpoints shown.

It's one thing to take some data, and do a show where a number of possible explanations or conclusions are explored with pros and cons discussed fully. That's good journalism IMO. You show some facts, you show the "process" of examining the facts, and you provide a discussion of those facts that results in an informed but not spoonfed audience.

It's quite a different thing to take some data, make a decision as to what facts they represent, and then write a segment aimed solely at convincing the viewers that your conclusion is the "truth". When you control all the information being presented in a news segment it is incredibly easy to convince viewers of something simply by omitting any counter evidence. For that reason it should be the responsibility of every journalist to ensure that if they are presenting conclusion that they make *absolutely* sure their conclusions are correct, and if they can't, that they make sure to include all relevant information, not just the stuff that supports their personal viewpoint.


Anything less then that is horrible journalism IMO. But that's exactly what I see on the TV literally every time I watch one of those shows.

Jindo-

In principal, I don't disagree with you.

However, in practice, I think that journalists on both sides, with very few exceptions, are incapable of divorcing their own opinions when it comes to their analysis of a given story.

Again, going back to that "Hardball" discussion, one of the panelists pointed out (rightly) that the lines between true journalistic reporting and political commentary in the pursuit of entertainment (and ratings?) have become blurred and the point at which you cross the self-imposed Wall Of Separation Between Opinion And Fact is too frequently crossed.

The lead news anchors- Rather, Williams, Brokaw, Hume, et.al., have to be held to higher standards than a commentator like Hannity, O'Reilly, Scarborough, Colmes, Begala, Stepannopoulis, et.al. Their fuctions in the reporting process are totally different. Hard news reporters should and must avoid at all cost interjecting their own personal views into the reporting process; commentators should have no such restrictions provided that they explicitly ackowledge that their words are merely their opinion.

I also will completely agree that the rush to be first, if not necessarily accurate, is a concern. You risk ceeding the scoop to another network if you delay to vett your story, but you risk looking like complete idiots if you report a fallacious story and are caught doing so. Personally, I'd say to Hell with speed- my credibility is more important to me.

Let me suggest a couple of really good books on this subject: "BIAS" and "ARROGANCE", both written by Bernard Goldberg. Lest you think this guy is a right-wing partisan political hack, I point out that he worked for CBS for 28 years, much of that time for Dan Rather as one of his leading correspondants. Both books are extraordinarily well-documented in their efforts to point out the agenda shared by most of the Old Media.

Nom -

Definition of a paragraph.

Learn it, use it, be the paragraph.

I do tend to prattle on a bit, don't I?
Wish I could blame alcohol, sadly, it's just my nature sometimes.
CBS's culpability? I care....seriously, I do. ;-)
The media has agendas, we don't have any news channels, it's a fact of life. When the news has to worry about ratings and whether or not they can afford to pay their top anchor millions of dollars, non-biased reporting of the facts goes out the window.
Wish there was another option.
I think it's why so many of us head to blogs or the Mirror or Australia Daily News, ya know? Trying to take in 19 sources of info and hopefully discern a little kernel of truth....BAH.
The only news source I won't quote is FauxNews...recent headline, Gas prices PLUMMET...story goes 3 cent drop over 2 weeks. If that's a plummet, I've got a yard-on a hard long.
Back to work.

I think the reason that most people immediately dismiss a report with the Fox News tagline on it is because it is usually the only point of view that is even slightly out of step with the way all the other media reports it. Like I've said before, Fox is only viewed as being Right-wing because all the other television news is so far Left wing.

If CBS had reported your story on oil prices, the headline would've been something like "Oil Prices Drop; Haliburton/Cheney Believed To Be Manipulating Prices To ***** Consumers".

Gas prices down here have dropped over 30 cents a gallon since their peak about eight weeks back. Since I drive something like 600 miles a week, you can bet I'm a happy camper on that score. Still, I'll conceed that 3 cents isn't exactly 'plummeting' in my book.

I hate to apear on the side of the mindless f*ckpig i quoted but he has a point. This time