No, but there is plenty wrong with airing a piece based on forged documents, and facilitating coordination with the DNC in running a smear campaign based on it.
With Memogate, they delayed while they “verified” the documents with experts. All the experts told them that the documents couldn’t be verified. Yet CBS went ahead anyway. Because there was an election coming up, and their boy was behind. Their motivation seems rather clear, and it is the same motivation that seems to be behind the rest of their stuff.
And so, quite rightly, people are going to take whatever they say with a grain of salt. CBS is not an unbiased or objective news organization. They are a bunch of partisan hacks, who will descend to using forged documents and offering unethical assistance to the DNC in furtherance of that bias.
Why would it be? It’s not really a secret. Just read the blogs (or Shodan’s posts) and it’s obvious that some people simply think CBS is out to get Bush, but that still doesn’t justify any of CBS’s actions.
Do you have examples of any CBS lies older than, say, the past month?
And if you ever manage to find evidence for this claim, other than “two guys talked on the phone one day”, it might be interesting.
It seems much more plausible that they went ahead because they were eager to be first with the story.
The rest of what stuff? Do you have any real evidence of CBS’s bias, or are you speculating based on a single event?
Repeating the same old nonsense doesn’t make it true. If you have evidence of bias at CBS, let’s see it. In the meantime, let’s reserve the term “partisan hacks” for news organizations that deserve it.
CBS certainly deserves the term here. The whole incident is “evidence of bias”. Their own experts told them the documents could not be authenticated. They went ahead with the story. The alleged author’s family told them they didn’t think he would have written this. They went ahead with the story. The alleged author had left the Texas ANG a year and a half before the date on the memos. They went ahead with the story. Their only verifiable source was a person already known to be both deliriously anti-Bush and an outright nut. They went ahead with the story anyway.
If they are even-handed, why didn’t they treat the Swift Boat Veterans the same way, and run a smear on Kerry six weeks before the elections? Because the allegations of the SBVT’s couldn’t be verified? That’s what their experts said about the memos.
As I mentioned, flip it and then consider. Suppose Fox News had run a story based on some memos the Swift Boat Veterans had come up with, alleging that Kerry had run away under fire or something. Every expert they talk to tells them the memos can’t be authenticated. But they not only run the story, but set up meetings between the SBVT groups and the RNC.
I want evidence that the meeting had anything to do with the ads. Evidence that Lockhart and Burkett talked about anything other than what they’ve publically claimed they talked about. Evidence that the conversation had any impact on the DNC’s actions.
Try this: CBS wants to sell advertisements, so they want to draw in viewers with a juicy story, so they rush to run the story before their competitors.
Looks like a big site, and mostly focused on Dan Rather himself. Since you seem familiar with it, can you pick out one or two items from the site that clearly show bias at CBS?
You have not shown that this had anything to do with political bias. The far more plausible explanation is that they wanted to be first with this story to rope in viewers, just as they’d want to be first with any story.
The important difference, as I’ve said before, is the news channel, not the political party. Your analogy presumes that CBS is some liberal counterpart to Fox News, which is simply fantasy.
As for political bias, all you have to do is ask yourself: “Would CBS have shown so much zeal to air a story that was highly critical of Kerry’s Vietnam service?” The word is that that Mary Mapes has been chasing this story for FIVE YEARS. Can you imagine CBS spending five years trying to find material to support the Swift Vets, for example?
Bill Burkett has been considered a lousy source for a long time. And yet, they keep going back to him, because he’s saying what they want to hear. John O’Neill, on the other hand, is a much more impressive figure, and yet he was discounted immediately and ignored.
Really, the bias at CBS is, in my opinion, beyond dispute. Dan Rather has a history of attacking and confronting Republican presidents. He’s gotten into famous on-air scraps with Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I. I can’t recall him ever getting into Carter or Clinton’s faces. I haven’t seen any hard-hitting pieces on John Kerry.
I think a much better case can be made for the fairness of ABC, CNN. And the Washington Post has been a real winner in this election season, fairly examining issues on both sides of the fence. My opinion of the Post has gone up tremendously.
But consider the New York Times. This is a magazine that put something like 50 articles in prominent positions in the paper over a manufactured conflict about women at the Augusta country club, yet they have all but ignored the Swift Vets and the CBS controversy. While papers like the Post have spent real resources trying to get to the bottom of these issues, the NY Times is virtually silent.
In this election season, I’d say that CBS and the New York Times have pretty much laid their bias out on the table, while many other organizations the right has suspected of bias have actually done a stand-up job trying to fairly cover the issues.
Considering Kerry’s Vietnam service is a well-established FACT, with a truckload of official papers, documents, orders, and commendations, there isn’t much point in paying attention to a handful of partisan crackpots with unprovable assertions otherwise (coughahemSwiftBullshittersForBush*cough).
George W. Bush’s Vietnam service, on the other hand, has been a mess o’ contradictions since the 2000 campaign – what Bush claims he did, and what the official documents (and eyewitnesses) says he didn’t. There’s always been plenty of room for the issue to be resolved one way or another; CBS getting excited because they believed they finally had evidence to settle the matter doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.
This from the guy who thinks John O’Neill is credible… :rolleyes:
If you click the links, you’ll notice that most of the referenced articles do indeed touch on the topics queried. Obvioulsy, I’ve not read all 700+, but even if you divide that number by half, Sam’s “virtually silent” assertion is nothing but rethorical artifice in order to underscore the “liberal media” mantra.
Dividing by 2 is an arbitrary action and we have no way of knowing whether the “correct” divisor is 2 or 200. But your point is well taken that Sam’s satements about coverage are indeed vague and open to criticism for that reason, and that the NYT was not “silent” (virtually or otherwise) on the matter, per your cites.
Maybe a better guage when comparing the coverage of certain items would be the number of front page stories. I only get the NYT on Sundays, so I really don’t know how little or how much these various stories were covered.
BTW, don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but if you Google News ’John Kerry", you get a lot of hits to openly partisan rightwing sites such as something called ‘Useless-Knowledge.com’ and ‘NewsMax’, while doing same for George Bush appears to give more hits to mainstream media.
And oh god ---- I feel Sumner’s pain! And I mean something other than the pile of money ass hurting pain I’d be sitting on as Sumner Redstone. I’m talking about REAL PAIN —the pain liberals practice in front of mirrors.
Oh, and you can buy Al Franken’s book at this site. The one where Al is pictured on the cover, arms crossed, doing that smarmy thing, you know, “Im the liberal intelligentsia,” except with his mouth. Yes - with his “mouth” and yes his name is “Al” - every prisoner’s dream - No?