Given that CBS fired and forced resignations for being gulled by a planted nesw story, which Fox and CNN execs should be forced to resign over being gulled by the Muslim terrorist group that claimed to have kidnapped an American serviceman, running stories and photos from the Muslim terrorist group’s website, and only later discovering that the photos clearly showed an action figure being threatened with a tiny plastic gun.
To me this shows a level of credibility and stupidity that is far beyond anything Rather’s team did.
I don’t see any reason for anyone to quit. How will that help anything? Mistakes will happen. If someone was grossly not doing his/her job correctly, then perhaps a firing is in order. If it was just a simple mistake, then whatever. Learn and move on.
I have to disagree. Rather was driven out for not checking his facts and putting out an untrue report. This was despite a long long career and a relatively good reputation. If the yardstick of complete accuracy and “due diligence” applies to him, it applies to ALL. If not, then I suppose there is some truth in any and all claims that the “Pursuit Of Truth” destruction of Rather’s distinguished career was just more partisan garbage.
Isn’t the idea behind reporting news first confirm, then report? I follow this rule on my websites, where I report drug deaths. About half I have been told about by family members don’t appear on my sites. My guess is almost all of these reports are true. However, I don’t report such absent direct confirmation with the coroner. Proof first, news report later.
None of them should be fired. They should just have their pictures and names released publicly so we can all get a chuckle over who fell for the kidnapped doll.
Why? I wasn’t able to immediately determine from the grainy photo that it was absolutely, postively a doll until the manuf of the items said "Yes it’s ours. Quite frankly the gun poking in from the side looked more fake than the doll.
Having said this, I do sort of suspect (possibly incorrectly) that the relatively high up, older decision making news executives that would vet this are somewhat isolated from everday life, and all the little play objects like solider dolls and such, that would be immediately recognizable to many younger people or parents with school age children, and thus would probably be easy to fool with a variety of different stunts.
Doesn’t really matter who pulled the wool over their eyes. The wool was pulled, but good. They were dumber than my dick. But hey, they might not be liberals, so let’s not fire 'em. Wouldn’t be proper.
I just think if you’re gonna have standards, they ought to be applied equally to all. The only oxen I see getting gored nowadays are Democratic/liberal/moderate oxen. Conservative “journalists” can apparently call the opposition traitors, expose cover CIA agents in their columns, etc. and not suffer ANY setbacks because of it.
I’m not saying the journalists in question over the GI D’oh! incident were partisans of any stripe, or that they fell for it because they were partisans. Just that if you’re going to fire Rather for credulous reporting, then there are some OTHER people who need to be fired over the G.I. D’oh! incident.
Actually, I only asked the question because I was curious if anyone had figured out the answer, yet. How it was staged or who staged it has no bearing on the future careers of network guys, but I am curious as to what actually happened.
Rather and the others were forced out not because of the fake memo, but because they defended it for 12 days, despite overwhelming evidence that the memo was a fake.
News of captured American soldiers is going to break quickly. Who knows, this may have brought the hoax to light more quickly, as the commanders said, “What? Captured? Quick, count heads!” and the toymakers said, “Hmmm. That looks a lot like the Commander Cody doll. Better investigate.”
Does anyone have a link to the original article? That would make the discussion a little easier.
CNN and FOX are not CBS. Why should one company base its firing policy on some other company’s policy?
Why? How does this make the world a better place? It has to be “fair”? Maybe Rather got screwed.
This is all irrelevant though, because as ivylass mentioned, we’re dealing with rather different situations. Even good journalists make mistakes sometimes. It happens. Yes, there should be mechanisms in place to discourage sloppiness, but I don’t see how screaming “Off with their heads!” whenever there is a little screw up is a good thing. A good journalist will acknoweldge his/her error and move on. A bad journalist will throw a tantrum for nearly two weeks. If the responsible party is a bad journalist, then a career change is in order. No one has established that the responsible party just made a simple error or is in fact a bad journalist.
