# Who told CBS Burkett had documents of interest?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-told-cbs-burkett-had-documents-of-interest/265552>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [September 22, 2004, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-told-cbs-burkett-had-documents-of-interest/265552 "2004-09-22T20:53:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![BlackKnight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/eb8c5e/32.png) [@BlackKnight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlackKnight)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-told-cbs-burkett-had-documents-of-interest/265552/21 "2004-09-23T07:35:17Z")

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> [@Sam Stone](#):
>
> The Dems on this board were …

False.

“_Some_ Dems on this board were …” would be correct. I’d even accept “Many Dems on this board were …” Let’s keep our brushes narrow.  
-BlackKnight, who is neither a D nor an R.

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**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2004, 12:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-told-cbs-burkett-had-documents-of-interest/265552/22 "2004-09-23T12:22:30Z")

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> [@Shayna](#):
>
> I wonder how you can claim to be an honest debater when you post factually incorrect information, proveably wrong, and then when called on it, wriggle around about something completely irrelevant to the correction I made.

I acknowledge the factual correction. The ads were not run by the Kerry campaign, but by the Democratic National Committee.

However, the gravamen of my observation was not that Kerry’s campaign, specifically, ran the ads, but that they were run in coordination with the CBS broadcast for the direct benefit of the Kerry campaign. As such, your correction, while technically accurate, did nothing to address the substance of the charge.

Believing that this sequence of events was immediately obvious to even the most casual reader, I initially declined to lay it out in such detail, instead posting a sarcastic response that I believed adequately highlighted the actual issue - the ethical conflict of a supposedly neutral journalistic organization directly coordinating its news broadcast information to aid the election efforts of one presidential candidate.

I now see that your myopic focus on detail does not permit such leaps of inference, and I will certainly keep that in mind in the future.

So, to carefully and accurately sum up:

1. Yes, you were right and I was wrong on the issue of what organization put out the “Fortunate Son” ads: it was the DNC, not the Kerry campaign.

2. Your views on the ethical conduct of CBS in coordinating advance information about their news broadcast with the **DNC** are unclear to me. Perhaps you’d care to comment.

- Rick

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