My, oh my… it has been purported on these boards that you are somewhat of a “legal expert”, but if you were to pull such a stunt in a court of law, I’m afraid you would be rebuked by the judge.
I wrote: “Wonder who did create those forgeries. CBS says that they don’t want to reveal the name of their source. (I guess they want to use the same source again.)”
You responded with: “who gave them the memos”.
Yes, CBS finally came around, but it was more from public pressure, rather than their own volition.
Now, regarding the CBS/Burkett collusion and the still remaining mystery of just who did create the forgeries, I maintain:
Sure it has as long as one ignores the which group is more likely to present falsehoods as truth.
As long as one ignores the issue of credibility, I’d say that you’re correct.
I won’t defend sloppy journalism, but it’s not the same as mendacious or politically biased journalism. You have to look to Fox et al. to find that. Furthermore, CBS News has publicly admitted its mistake. When are the Swifties going to admit theirs?
Of course a major news organization should be held to a higher standard than a short-duration partisan political organization. But even by that standard CBS News compares favorably. Look at all it’s done, all the perfectly accurate and highly important stories it has brought to light and shown to the world, since the 1950s; in light of that, we should be prepared to forgive a mistake which was corrected immediately, and which in the final analysis harmed nothing and nobody but the reputation of CBS itself. (Especially since we have some reason to believe, from other sources, that the things 60 Minutes said about Bush’s National Guard nonservice were perfectly true even if the sources they were citing were unreliable.) Whereas the SBVT, since it was formed, has done absolutely nothing that was not reprehensible. No, the Swifties are not “startin’ to look pretty good.”
254 veterans come forward, led by 17 officers who all personally knew Kerry in Vietnam. They wave 17 affidavits attesting to lies and malfeasance by Kerry. This group of officers consists of Kerry’s entire living chain of command, including two Admirals and one former JAG for the Navy.
CBS response: Nada. Zip. These guys held a press conference back in February, and got ZERO major media coverage. Their 17 affidavits somehow don’t meet CBS’s high journalistic standards.
Later, one guy with a history of attacks on Bush and the guard comes forward with some badly forged memos, which he claims were given to him by a shadowy figure he can’t identify. CBS gives memos to several experts, all of whom have grave misgivings as to their authenticity. CBS response: HOLD THE PRESSES! WE’RE GOING NATIONAL WITH THIS ONE!
No, it was a little more than a mistake. CBS, in an act of political partisanship, gambled and lost. and it wasn’t corrected immediately. No, CBS showed its true colors by insisting that even though the documents may be forgeries, the content was nevertheless accurate.
Exactly. This was not business as usual. They got the scoop and instead of checking the sources thorougly (when have the major media made an error of this magnitude?), they rushed to get it out in two or three days, ignoring the objections of their own document experts. The fact that the bloggers were able to find fault with the documents attests to how many safeguards were overridden in their rush to get out the Bush-bashing story.
And their response has been wholly inadequate - two weeks ago Rather was saying that there was no chance of an investigation or apology. Nobody’s lost his shirt yet. Can you imagine the outrage (especially on the SDMB) if Fox produced some documents, later known to be false, showing that Kerry was AWOL in VIetnam, and the above facts were true? As Murdoch said, they’d be crucified.
This whole incident begs the questions, of course, how many such hoaxes were aired in the past, before the blogosphere began watching the watchmen?
Well, you keep claiming this but you don’t have any support for it. And, you ignore examples in the other direction of stories that were rushed or not carefully enough checked, like Judith Miller’s in the N.Y. Times, stories that were not even found out to be false soon enough to correct the damage that was done.
No, what you have done is taken a stupid mistake by CBS and exploited for partisan political purposes.
Well, it is not CBS who said this…It is the secretary who would have typed the actual documents in question who said that while these were not the original documents, they were similar to actual documents she did remember typing and they accurately reflected the basic views of her boss.
That this fact has been largely lost in the hype over the forged documents shows that the net effect of CBS’s gullibility has been to hurt the Democrats more than to help them. But, like I said in a previous posts (Do you even read any of my posts???), I am not psychic so I will not be making claims as to CBS’s motivations here.
For all your whining, it was only a few days before CBS admitted that the documents did not seem to be genuine and announced an independent investigation. The N.Y. Times took over a year before they even apologized for Judth Miller’s reporting and even then it was fairly half-assed (they wouldn’t even mention her by name). And, they didn’t propose any independent investigation.
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Can you imagine the outrage (especially on the SDMB) if Fox produced some documents, later known to be false, showing that Kerry was AWOL in VIetnam, and the above facts were true? As Murdoch said, they’d be crucified.
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Well, we don’t have this exact example. But, I have brought up examples of incidents bearing some similarity. There is the forged Niger document incident where it was admittedly the President rather than the news media that relied on forged documents that should easily have been recognized as forgeries…And, did so, if I recall correctly, long after the documents were known not to be genuine. This story was reported but seems to have been harped upon less than the CBS case and I don’t believe there has been an independent investigation.
And, then in terms of the media, as I noted, you have the fanciful reporting of Judith Miller, which has been way-underreported.
Just a point of order if I may. Are you claiming that there have been no investigations which included the forged Nigerian documents? Are you claiming that none of the investigations were independant of the White House? Or are you complaining that none of them count as either because they did not focus on this one document exclusively?
The claim, which I made tentatively (hence the “I believe”), is that I did not think there had been any investigation independent of the White House (or obvious interested parties like the intelligence services themselves) that looked into this in any reasonable detail. It wouldn’t have to be the exclusive focus. I’d be happy to be corrected on this point if you know otherwise.