Rather's Parachute rescues him from firing!

[Narith]

Yeah.. yet another konspirocy!

And I am the one with my head in the sand? O_o

[davidking]

Bush had an abysmal record as a Guardsman in a champagne squadron to avoid Vietnam service, we know this. Even if the document was real it'd be gilding the lily.

Yeah I bet you know all this as fact like Rather did, and have proof even.

[Relbeek Einre]

Yeah, actually, the service records that exist pretty well show it.

[davidking]

the only thingsssss those records prove were thathe was an averege pilot.. nothing disgraceful in what he did.

[Sindarre]

Well I'm not sure if anyone here bothered to read through the full report...

http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/ ... Report.pdf

Suffice it to say it goes WELL beyond the authenticity of documents. Such as (selective cutting.. do read the whole document for complete context and further hits) ...

"The Panel finds that virtually every excerpt used from the Lieutenant Strong interview was either inaccurate or misleading. Indeed, the Panel questions whether any Lieutenant Strong excerpts should have been used at all, given his total lack of personal knowledge."
"The Ben Barnes Interview Excerpts Were Misleading"
Whole chapters were given over to these interviews alone.

Contradictory testimony concerning conversations with the Kerry campaign. (more extensive then thought??)
Mapes is practically crucified in the report. The incompetence is so gross that it's impossible to believe it could be imcompetence. She basically lied through her teeth on almost every aspect of the story... blew off orders to follow up on some sections of the piece. etc. etc. You come away with no doubt why the canned her vice asking her to resign.

The report goes on:
"Based on the recollections of those present at the meeting and the vetting sessions the previous day, it appears that Mapes did not disclose the following to 60 Minutes Wednesday management prior to the airing of the Segment on September 8:

• That she had interviewed several people in 1999, including General Staudt and Major
General Hodges, who told her that, contrary to Barnes’ statements, no influence was
used to get President Bush into the TexANG, and that Barnes himself was not certain
that his call to General Rose had gotten him in;
• That Barnes had given a speech similar to his interview in May at a Kerry campaign
• That none of the experts could authenticate the documents because they were copies;
• That Matley’s analysis was limited to the Killian signatures, which appeared on only
one of the four documents used in the Segment, and that the other three documents
used had not been verified by any of the document examiners;
• That at least one expert had raised concerns not only about the superscript “th,” but
also proportional spacing, font, terminology and the signatures;
• That Lieutenant Strong did not have personal knowledge of then-Lieutenant Bush’s
service record in the TexANG or the Killian documents;
• That inadequate steps had been taken to confirm Lieutenant Colonel Burkett’s
statement, which would be included in the Segment, that the Killian documents were
taken from Lieutenant Colonel Killian’s personal files."

Beeker.. might I suggest page 130 and on regarding your abysmal service record comment. Make special note of the comparison of the memo's take on Bush's service (abysmal) and the official records take on Bush's service (exceptional performance evaluation, honorable discharge, etc.) You might also be suprised what you read about the supposed waiting list Bush skipped over to get into the service.

In summary (I'm way too tired and going to bed I might post more tomorrow) It's way more then we thought. The documents prove to be only PART of the story. The commision tears them apart on almost every single aspect of the story.

[Burz]

Ron Burgundy would pwn Rather!

Dd

If he says it. It must be true!


Fuck You San Diego!

[Relbeek Einre]

Sindarre...I think it'd be best if I just ducked the whole Bush's service argument again. Suffice it to say there's a lot of actually true evidence (like, that existed long before the 60 minutes story) and Bush has refused to release part of his ANG records.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Sindarre...I think it'd be best if I just ducked the whole Bush's service argument again. Suffice it to say there's a lot of actually true evidence (like, that existed long before the 60 minutes story) and Bush has refused to release part of his ANG records.

Yeah, it would. Because that's not the point of the thread, is it? The issue at hand is that some journalists engaged in a very deliberate attempt to present only the information that furtherred their view of the President... they pushed an agenda, and it wasn't honest reporting. It was a hatchet job, a personal attack piece.

[Relbeek Einre]

In Mapes' case, that definitely appears to be a true statement, Embar.

[davidking]

This stuff is pretty funny..

http://www.ratherbiased.com/latest/

[Sindarre]

Yeah we should avoid that argument. Sorry I jumped on your attempt at deflection, possibly not intentional, I usually ignore those.

After reading more of the report I find it actually makes a good case that pretty much everyone including Dan Rather was led down the garden path by Mapes. But that is still no excuse at all really. These were very smart people and they went down the path because they wanted to go down that path. Rather gave all those interviews. He knew what was said during them and knew they were edited down to rip bush. But it seems, from the way the report reads, that Rather was mostly out of the loop during this piece and was really more of a prop used by Mapes and the producers then a journalist. He didn't verify anything.. he counted on Mapes to do it. He didn't have one bit of journalist hunting in this story at all.. Mapes was doing all the legwork, phonework, background.

After you read the report you get the sense that Rather was just not really involved till the very end and then just did the interviews and gave the report. He seems to come out pretty clean but only because he was only a talking head anchor for this and not a journalist breaking a story he ran down through hard work. Sad.

[davidking]

I agree, the initial report looks like its all about Mary... but all the defensive reactional kneejerks from Rather is not pretty and pretty sad that Rather didn't check his sources when things started looking bad.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Well.... in the case of Rather.. he's either a lying, conniving schmuck who is pushing an agenda, or he's an doddering and decrepit pseudo-journalist who has long since given up any real effort at maintaining accuracy in reporting.

Which label would you prefer if you were he?

[Relbeek Einre]

Trolling again, Embar? If so, that's a better one, it's a schmuck's statement, but one I could see you making and believing.

[Eidolon Faer]

I must admit, I was deeply disappointed when I saw the summary of the CBS independent report. It looked like a whitewash to me.

CBS defended that beast of Mary Mapes' story for nearly two weeks, in the face of the most jaw-droppingly obvious forgery. Two weeks.

First of all, if Dan Blather didn't check the facts before he put his face on National TV and read them off the teleprompter, he DAMNED WELL should have checked them himself before he went on national TV to defend them. And yet, defend them he did. Over and over again, despite expert after expert complaining about being misquoted by CBS.

Yes, Mary Mapes foisted off an unholy abomination of a story on CBS. But what baffles me is why CBS continued to defend the reputation of this madwoman even after her lies had been exposed, nearly to the ruin of CBS News as a whole. She should have been fired back when the phone conversations to Joe Lockhart and the Kerry Campaign came out. And if her feet touched the ground as the two burly security guards hustled her to the door, she'd have got better than she deserved.

Given the fact that CBS asked for--and paid for--the "independent" investigation themselves, given their inexplicable slowness in canning Mapes, and given the extraordinary lengths they went to in defense of this story back when they were still trying to stick by it, I wasn't expecting much from this report. But I was disappointed nonetheless. CBS did the absolute minimum it could do and still survive. They're trying to get away with their bias, not fix it.



There's an Op-Ed in the Washington Times that raises some other questions I find particularly interesting. I'd like to share it with you here:

http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/200501 ... -3688r.htm

Damage control at Black Rock

By Tony Blankley

Let's start with the title of the CBS Panel: "Report of the Independent Review Panel Dick Thornburgh and Lewis D. Boccardi; Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP, Counsel to the Independent Review Panel." My first question is from whom is the review panel and its hired lawyers independent? Who paid the law firm for its hundreds, probably thousands of hours of research? I assume CBS paid them.

Keep in mind, it was the law firm which did the actual investigation. I have already communicated with one person who was contacted by a lawyer for the firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart who was told that they were carrying out the investigation's research. And, of course, Mr. Thornburgh is a senior member of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP.

So the lawyers hired to independently investigate CBS have a lawyer/client relationship with CBS. Presumably, as a senior member of that firm, Independent Review Panel Member Richard Thornburgh also has CBS as a fiduciary client. Thus, unlike similarly named government independent investigations — this one is paid for by, and carried out on behalf of, the target of the investigation.

The foregoing is not meant to impugn the integrity of Mr. Thornburgh. He is a man of proven integrity. But it is meant to try to determine what his ethical obligations required of him. If CBS is his legal client, then he has an ethical obligation to represent CBS's best interests — and certainly to minimize any exposure CBS might have to legal liability for their conduct.

I would assume that as a former attorney general and public man, he would also feel an ethical obligation not to report facts to the public other than those he believed to be correct and in fair context. While those two sets of ethical imperatives may sometimes be hard to manage simultaneously, from a first reading of the report it appears to me that he has upheld both of those ethical obligations.

Thus, the report issued this week appears to be a very thorough and accurate rendition of facts that demonstrate the bad journalism practiced by CBS.

This fulfills both his ethical obligations. He has been honest with his factual report, and, by being so, he has helped CBS appear to be coming clean with the public.

But where he has boldly sought and reported the objective facts, he has been cautious and inconclusive regarding the subjective characterizing of those facts.

So, for example, if CBS's own hired lawyer, Mr. Thornburgh had found that the document in question was actually a fraudulent Department of Defense document, or that anyone at CBS subjectively believed the document was fraudulent before they used devices of interstate commerce to broadcast it, he might have exposed CBS to criminal and civil liability on both forging government documents and wire fraud charges. The Thornburgh/Boccardi Report makes no such conclusion, although it does present facts that might lead a reasonable person to reach such a conclusion.

Neither did the report conclude that political motivations may have played a role in the bad journalism. Although, once again, the report had a whole section meticulously itemizing evidence of political or anti-Bush motivation. (This section, however, while accurate, was very far from exhaustive. For instance, no mention was made of the fact that Dan Rather had, in the past, spoken at a Texas Democratic Party fundraiser. No effort was made to do content analysis of Mr. Rather's news casts over the years to measure party bias — an established technique used in academe on exactly such research projects.)

The two greatest dangers to CBS coming out of the September 8 broadcast were that it would be found that they: 1) knowingly broadcast fraudulent Defense Department documents, and 2) were motivated to do so because they are biased against George Bush and the Republican Party.

And it was on those two vital points that the Thornburgh Report failed to come to a conclusion. The report's concession of bad journalism merely conceded the undeniable. That fact had been apparent to most of the public and virtually all of the major news outlets by about September 10. Conceding bad journalism was merely a belated bow to undeniable reality. They couldn't possibly have conceded less than they did.

But the "Independent Panel" provided one more service to CBS. It showed the report to CBS executives before it released it to the public. Thus CBS was given a public-relations crises management expert's dream — the extraordinarily valuable opportunity of simultaneously announcing the report's findings and CBS's corporate response to the findings — which was to fire key executives and producers below Mr. Rather.

Thus, there was no headline this week stating that CBS admits documents were a fraud or caused by partisan bias. Instead, the headlines in papers as diverse as The New York Times, The Washington Times and The Washington Post were all the same: CBS fires 4. That headline was followed by the finding that CBS's journalistic standards had been deficient. As they say — that's old news.

The crisis has been defused. The damage has been limited. Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP have earned every last penny of the undoubtedly huge legal/PR bill that is now, presumably, in the mail to CBS.