HOW BIASED IS CBS AND THE MAINSTREAM PRESS?

CBS has committed five years of effort and resources by senior producer (Mary Mapes) and her staff, to digging through 30 year old service records of George W. Bush in search of any evidence that would help them remove him from the oval office.

When CBS failed to unearth any damning evidence concerning Bush’s Guard service after five years of in depth research, they became party to disseminating forged evidence needed to pursue their agenda.

CBS claims that it was a BIG story worthy of pursuit, having nothing to do with the political ideology of the CBS staff. If that’s the case, how much time have they spent researching an even BIGGER story, why it took presidential candidate John Kerry almost 30 years to negotiate an honorable discharge from the Navy? Why is Kerry the only candidate who has NOT signed form 180 releasing his complete military record?

How much time did CBS spend interviewing more than 250 decorated Vietnam Vets who have once again put their own lives on the line for their country by exposing one of the most powerful men in America at the worst possible time?

If you guessed that CBS has spent no time at all on these two stories, (other than the obligatory effort to discredit the stories without first researching them), you would be correct.

Star producer, Mary Mapes has a long standing reputation for being a flaming liberal unable to contain her hatred for the Right on most days. Her own father describes her as a left-wing-nut come loose. We have all watched Dan Rather fire shells at the Bush’s for years, so we know there is no love lost there.

What’s clear about the CBS Guard story today is that CBS employs the only people in America unable to recognize the forgeries. Mary Mapes was so eager to bring down the President that she even crossed a line never to be crossed, coordinating attack efforts with the DNC and Kerry campaign against Bush by feeding Kerry advisors information, sources and timing.

It doesn’t get any more biased than this, short of joining an assassination plot. This much is clear to everyone at this point. What about the rest of the mainstream press?

Competitive news networks have piled on Dan Rather to some degree because no modern journalist worth their salt could pass up an opportunity to attack a competitor of Dan Rather’s stature. But what’s going on behind the scenes?

Bill Burkett has not been charged with forging government documents which is a felony, the DNC and the Kerry campaign are not being investigated for campaign fraud which would end Kerry’s bid for the White House immediately, and Dan and Mary still have a coffee cup with their name on it at CBS.

Everyone close to the Bush Guard story has discredited not only the documents, but the sentiments in the those documents, from the alleged authors family to Bush’s fellow officers and the man accused of “pressuring for a whitewash” of Bush’s record.

Yet queen of the White House Press Corp., Helen Thomas sees the story this way, “To me, the real issue is why doesn't the president tell us the truth? Why doesn't he [Bush] put out all the documents? Because he can't, because there are too many gaps.” Clearly not the least concerned with the fact that the only evidence presented was false evidence.

Asbury Park Press writes, Thomas called Rather "a magnificent reporter" who experienced every reporter's nightmare in connection with his airing of unauthenticated material in a Sept. 8 broadcast of "60 Minutes II."

"Truth is our Holy Grail" she said. "I'm sure everybody is feeling bad about it." But what Rather and Thomas are “feeling bad” about, is getting caught, nothing more.

In her own column for Hearst Newspapers, Thomas said, "Kerry has blown it big time," she wrote, "rising to Bush's bait and throwing away his ace in the hole – Bush's shaky credibility on the profound question of war and peace." Does this sound like a person without a "dog in the fight"?

ABC, NBC, CNN and MSNBC were quick to report the gaffe by CBS and Rather once the forgeries became obvious. But they were all equally quick to promote the idea that even though the documents were clear forgeries, the sentiments in the forged documents are still relevant. Rule number one of good journalism, if the source or evidence isn’t credible, neither is the story.

Yet the entire mainstream press is working around the clock to promote two ideas, that Bush is still somehow tainted by the story, and that the Kerry campaign, (which is in this thing up to their eyeballs), had nothing to do with it.

The facts support quite a different story though, maybe the BIGGEST story since Watergate, and thanks to the bloggers out there, this story isn’t going to be whitewashed.

We have watched the mainstream press push their liberal agenda down our throats for years now, but this is the first time I remember seeing a news crew willing to forge or promote forged evidence to promote their agenda, the first time we have seen direct smear campaign coordination between a primary news network and a presidential candidates staff.

It isn’t enough that anyone apologize. It isn’t enough that Kerry not be elected president, or that CBS get a slap on the wrist.

When all the evidence is on the table, we are going to see that this was a coordinated effort involving CBS staff, Democratic Party operatives in Texas, and Kerry campaign advisors, using falsified government documents, to bring down a sitting president. It doesn’t get any worse than that!

How the mainstream press responds to this evidence will define the future of network news. So far, the mainstream press is failing the test miserably, opting to continue on the path of making a story against Bush that doesn’t exist, while ignoring the BIGGER questions concerning Kerry’s discharge that came 30 years late.

This isn’t a partisan issue; this is an issue concerning the credibility of the mainstream press and the quality of information being passed through them to the American people.

This morning Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Allawi stood before the US Congress to report the truth about conditions in Iraq, stating repeatedly, that contrary to US media reports, his country is in far better condition today, with a brighter future than ever in Iraq’s history. He said 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces could hold free election safely tomorrow, and that media reports of terrorists attacks greatly overstate the problems in 3 of 18 provinces.

All cable news outlets aired the speech live, but CBS, ABC and NBC chose to air Regis, Montel and Katie Couric’s talk show instead, because everything Prime Minister Allawi said was at odds with what all three networks have been telling us about Iraq, and at odds with those networks presidential candidate of choice, John Kerry.

Those who don’t subscribe to cable news will ever know the truth about conditions in Iraq or the success of Bush policies, because the networks won’t tell them, and they will cast their vote come November on this basis.

No matter ones politics, if this is the best information we can get from the press, America will have to find their own information elsewhere, a trend that has been growing for some time already.

If we can’t get unfiltered unbiased information from our nations news rooms, we don’t need any news rooms. The press is writing its own future as we speak and I hope they are paying attention to the gravity of the situation they find themselves in. Comment to author: jbw@jb-williams.com

Victor Davis Hanson: "The Fall" (of Dan). VDH at his best today.

Nat Review ^

September 24, 2004

Dan Rather's initial, furious street-side defense of an amateurish forgery — smug, huffy, self-righteous — brings to mind one of those bad movies about the Paris barricades, especially the grainy, black-and-white shots of powdered and wigged aristocrats on their way to the Guillotine, yelling out of their carriages at pitchfork-carrying peasants.

Worse than being duped, worse than cobbling together a highly politicized hit-piece during a war and in the waning days of an election, worse than the shady nature of the "unimpeachable" sources and the likely sordid origins of the story, and worse even than the pathetic nature of CBS's "expert" witnesses — worse than all that was Rather's ten-day denial of reality, culminating in the surreal half-admission that the phony documents could not be verified as accurate. That's the equivalent of saying that a corpse cannot be proven to be alive.

Commentators have envisioned Rather's fall as symbolic of a "paradigm shift" and the "end of the era" — an event that has crystallized the much larger and ongoing demise of the old establishment media. Allegories from the French Revolution and the emperor without any clothes to the curtain scene in The Wizard of Oz have been evoked to illustrate Rather's dilemma and the hypocrisy of all that went before. We have come a long way since the 1960s: The once-revolutionary pigs taking over the manor are now bloated and strutting on two legs as they feast on silver inside the farmhouse.

First CBS went into denial; then it tried to smear its critics; next it emulated the Nixonian two-step; and finally it stonewalled altogether, hoping that the 24-hour news buzz would fade before it ultimately did. Meanwhile, more and more Americans yawn and have already switched the channel to cable news. We keep waiting for Mike Wallace on Sunday's 60 Minutes to stare down Dan Rather on the set of Tuesday's 60 Minutes, sticking his mike in Dan's face, springing on him a long list of his previously unknown sins, capped off with the zoom shot on a fidgety, sweating Rather, as the tick, tick, tick fades into a primetime commercial.

The Big Three may deride the newsreaders at Fox as blond bimbos, but millions of Americans learned long ago that there are probably more liberals on Fox than conservatives on PBS, NPR, CBS, ABC, and NBC combined — and the former are honest about politics in a way the latter are not.

The New York Times talks about standards and "journalistic integrity," but given its recent public record no one was surprised by the existence of a Jayson Blair, or by the fact that under Howell Raines a once-grand paper became a caricature of 19th-century yellow journalism, with possibly fewer daily readers than Matt Drudge. Elites may lament that someone who did not go to the Columbia School of Journalism can affect more readers than the Times, but instead of the usual aristocratic snarls they should ask themselves how and why that came about — and why, for example, watching a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers or listening to Garrison Keillor on NPR is now to endure a publicly subsidized extension of their silly rants at lectures and in op-eds.

It has taken a lot to end the credibility of the liberal dynasty, inasmuch as there were many prior provocations — Peter Arnett airing a blatantly dishonest 1998 mythodrama on CNN about Americans using Sarin gas in Laos; Dan Rather giving a flawed 1988 account of American grotesqueries in Vietnam (The Wall Within), replete with phony veterans spinning lies about horrific war crimes. But then we have not quite seen anything like the shamelessness of airing forged documents backed by unhinged witnesses and verified by suspect "experts" — all in a time of war and with the intent of smearing a sitting conservative president.

True, given his history and influence, Dan Rather was the most logical person to pull all that off — and so now he is the right person to take the collective fall for the sins of his brethren. How strange that bloggers are far more representative of democratic culture than Rather; that dittoheads are grassroots in a way that NPR is not; and that cable news is more honest in its politicking than Peter Jennings. No wonder CBS has gone from being controversial to annoying, and soon irrelevant — the ultimate sin given the corporate bottom line.

Hypocrisy and aristocratic smugness are drawing the ancient regime to its death. Rather's now-ossified generation came of age in the heady Vietnam era, on the apparent premise that Main Street, USA, and the Kiwanis had given us Vietnam, Watergate, racism, and the other isms and phobias — and that only hip, swashbuckling 60s-types could tell the American people the "truth" about what the "establishment" was up to.

Ever so incrementally along this inevitable road to Rathergate, John Kerry's searing Cambodia-patrol story, and Kitty Kelley's Reagan and Bush pseudographies, many Americans began to worry about the ends-justifying-the-means culture of the sanctimonious Left. The counterculture was defended on the dubious premise that the activists needed to fight fire with fire as they exposed everything from Nixon's lies to the embarrassing Pentagon Papers.

But in the process there also began a professional devolution, as questionable legal and ethical methods were excused in the name of the greater good. We got the Ellsberg pilfered documents, the blank check of "unnamed sources," trips to Hanoi and Paris to meet the enemy, Peter Arnett broadcasting gloom and doom live from Baghdad — all culminating in the two-bit forgeries used for the "higher" cause of unseating George Bush. Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, and CBS may have done things that were legally wrong (like the latter's promulgating fraudulent government documents to defame a government official), but in postmodern logic they were morally "right" given their superior knowledge, character, and progressive intentions.

We do not expect any more citations of sources in Bob Woodward's "inside" history, even when he uncovers thought processes buried deep inside someone's brain; after all, he discovered Deep Throat and broke Watergate. The list of plagiarist historians is long and growing, yet mitigating circumstances are advanced since such mendacity is useful in exposing the bad gun and bomb lobbies or praising the good Kennedys.

Wasn't it wrong that Jimmy Carter campaigned for a Peace Prize by venomous criticism of his country on the eve of war — and was praised for it by the Nobel committee, which gave him the medal at that precise time? No problem, he builds houses for the poor and loves the U.N. Who cares that Teresa Heinz-Kerry and John Edwards rant on about those who are "un-American"? They, of all people, can't be employing McCarthyesque invective, can they?

But the regime is crumbling on campuses as well. Too many university professors in the humanities dropped long ago their allegiance to the disinterested search for truth, or to teaching students facts and methods. How could one be so constrained and parochial when a war was raging on, and millions of youth needed to be prepared as ideological warriors in the struggle to remake our culture? Meanwhile, teaching loads decreased, annual tuition soared higher than the rate of inflation, and the baccalaureate no longer reflected much erudition. Surely, progressive academics, of all people, would not stand by while their curriculum was politicized, free speech suppressed, their part-time lecturers systematically exploited, their working-class students priced out of the market, and their research tainted with bias?

The U.N. also seems to be going the way of CBS. Only a little over a quarter of our citizenry feels that the organization reflects American values. Kofi Annan was blind to the greatest financial scandal of our time, one that contributed to the deaths of thousands in Iraq and enriched cronies, including perhaps his own son. He survives only because a biased media has judged that his progressivism warrants shielding him from the type of scrutiny afforded Halliburton.

Under Mr. Annan, the U.N. won't say a word about Tibet or do anything about the thousands butchered in Africa — how can it when murdering states such as Cuba, Algeria, and Iran are on its committees overseeing human rights? Kofi Annan's U.N. has lost its ideals, become counterfeit, and thus is now mostly irrelevant.

Those who profess to be Democrats are reaching historically low numbers. Many prominent Democrats are hypocrites: Feminists Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton were uncouth womanizers; the principled war critic Senator Byrd cut his teeth in the Klan; and the self-proclaimed moralists Senators Harkin and Kennedy have both been caught in postmodern problems with the truth. Being rich and a lawyer helps too. Most prominent Democrats and their enablers are either lawyers or multimillionaires, and now often both. Running a hardware store may explain your Republicanism; inheriting the profits from a chain of 1,000 hardware franchises will likely make you a new Democrat.

If we wonder why CBS is in trouble, why no one trusts the universities or the U.N., or why the Democrats may soon lose the Senate, the House, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, the answer has a lot to do with arrogant hypocrisy — the idea that how one lives need have nothing to do with what one professes, that idealistic rhetoric can provide psychological cover for privilege and preference, and that rules need not apply for those self-proclaimed as smarter and nicer than the rest of us. But none of us — none — get a pass simply because we claim that we are more moral, educated, or sophisticated than most.

In the meantime, as this unclean tale slowly reaches it end — and it will — CBS soon may have to decide between having Dan Rather and having an audience. Dan Rather, in his abject non-professionalism and in his overweening arrogance, has become the symbol of all that has gone so terribly wrong with our once-romantic but now confused, compromised, and aging generation of change. Such are the wages for those who destroy timeless rules and proven protocols for short-term expediency and thus find no sanctuary in their own hour of need.

Mr. Rather would do well to remember Leo Amery's famous evocation of Cromwell, when he once bade Neville Chamberlain to get out:

"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

So, Dan, go, and let us have done with you — in the name of God, go now.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a visiting professor for the month of September and a fellow of Hillsdale College.

Don't forget about the yellow SOB's at Knight Ridder

Posted on Sat, Sep. 25, 2004
Click here to find out more!

Iraqi civilian casualties mounting

By NANCY A. YOUSSEF

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.

According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.

While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher.

During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed.

Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.

That suggests that more aggressive U.S. military operations, which the Bush administration has said are being planned to clear the way for nationwide elections scheduled for January, could backfire and strengthen the insurgency.

American military officials said "damage will happen" in their effort to wrest control of some areas from insurgents. They blamed the insurgents for embedding themselves in communities, saying that's endangering innocent people.

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, an American military spokesman, said the insurgents were living in residential areas, sometimes in homes filled with munitions.

"As long as they continue to do that, they are putting the residents at risk," Boylan said. "We will go after them."

Boylan said the military conducted intelligence to determine whether a home housed insurgents before striking it. While damage would happen, the airstrikes were "extremely precise," he said. And he said that any attacks by the multinational forces were "in coordination with the interim government."

The Health Ministry statistics indicate that more children have been killed around Ramadi and Fallujah than in Baghdad, though those cities together have only one-fifth of the Iraqi capital's population.

According to the statistics, 59 children were killed in Anbar province - a hotbed of the Sunni Muslim insurgency that includes the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah - compared with 56 children in Baghdad. The ministry defines children as anyone younger than 12.

"When there are military clashes, we see innocent people die," said Dr. Walid Hamed, a member of the operations section of the Health Ministry, which compiles the statistics.

Juan Cole, a history professor at University of Michigan who specializes in Shiite Islam, said the widespread casualties meant that coalition forces already had lost the political campaign: "I think they lost the hearts and minds a long time ago."

"And they are trying to keep U.S. military casualties to a minimum in the run-up to the U.S. elections" by using airstrikes instead of ground forces, he said.

American military officials say they're targeting only terrorists and are aggressively working to spare innocent people nearby.

Nearly a third of the Iraqi dead - 1,122 - were killed in August, according to the statistics. May was the second deadliest month, with 749 Iraqis killed, and 319 were killed in June, the least violent month. Most of those killed lived in Baghdad; the ministry found that 1,068 had died in the capital.

Many Iraqis said they thought the numbers showed that the multinational forces disregarded their lives.

"The Americans do not care about the Iraqis. They don't care if they get killed, because they don't care about the citizens," said Abu Mohammed, 50, who was a major general in Saddam Hussein's army in Baghdad. "The Americans keep criticizing Saddam for the mass graves. How many graves are the Americans making in Iraq?"

At his fruit stand in southern Baghdad, Raid Ibraham, 24, theorized: "The Americans keep attacking the cities not to keep the security situation stable, but so they can stay in Iraq and control the oil."

Others blame the multinational forces for allowing security to disintegrate, inviting terrorists from everywhere and threatening the lives of everyday Iraqis.

"Anyone who hates America has come here to fight: Saddam's supporters, people who don't have jobs, other Arab fighters. All these people are on our streets," said Hamed, the ministry official. "But everyone is afraid of the Americans, not the fighters. And they should be."

Iraqi officials said about two-thirds of the Iraqi deaths were caused by multinational forces and police; the remaining third died from insurgent attacks. The ministry began separating attacks by multinational and police forces and insurgents June 10.

From that date until Sept. 10, 1,295 Iraqis were killed in clashes with multinational forces and police versus 516 killed in terrorist operations, the ministry said. The ministry defined terrorist operations as explosive devices in residential areas, car bombs or assassinations.

The ministry said it didn't have any statistics for the three provinces in the north: Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah, ethnic Kurdish areas that generally have been more peaceful than the rest of the country.

The Health Ministry is the only organization that attempts to track deaths through government agencies. The U.S. military said it kept estimates, but it refused to release them. Ahmed al Rawi, the communications director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad, said the organization didn't have the staffing to compile such information.

The Health Ministry reports to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whom the United States appointed in June.

Iraqi health and hospital officials agreed that the statistics captured only part of the death toll.

To compile the data, the Health Ministry calls the directors general of the 15 provinces and asks how many deaths related to the war were reported at hospitals. The tracking of such information has become decentralized since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime because both hospitals and morgues issue death certificates now. And families often bury their dead without telling any government agencies or are treated at facilities that don't report to the government.

The ministry is convinced that nearly all of those reported dead are civilians, not insurgents. Most often, a family member wouldn't report it if his or her relative died fighting for rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia or another insurgent force, and the relative would be buried immediately, said Dr. Shihab Ahmed Jassim, another member of the ministry's operations section.

"People who participate in the conflict don't come to the hospital. Their families are afraid they will be punished," said Dr. Yasin Mustaf, the assistant manager of al Kimdi Hospital near Baghdad's poor Sadr City neighborhood. "Usually, the innocent people come to the hospital. That is what the numbers show."

The numbers also exclude those whose bodies were too mutilated to be recovered at car bombings or other attacks, the ministry said.

Ministry officials said they didn't know how big the undercount was. "We have nothing to do with politics," Jassim said.

Other independent organizations have estimated that 7,000 to 12,000 Iraqis have been killed since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations.

Iraqis are aware of the casualties that are due to U.S. forces, and nearly everyone has a story to tell.

At al Kimdi Hospital, Dr. Mumtaz Jaber, a vascular surgeon, said that three months ago, his 3-year-old nephew, his sister and his brother-in-law were driving in Baghdad at about 9 p.m. when they saw an American checkpoint. His nephew was killed.

"They didn't stop fast enough. The Americans shot them immediately," Jaber said. "This is how so many die."

At the Baghdad morgue, Dr. Quasis Hassan Salem said he saw a family of eight brought in: three women, three men and two children. They were sleeping on their roof last month because it was hot inside. A military helicopter shot at them and killed them: "I don't know why."

U.S. officials said any allegations that soldiers had recklessly killed Iraqi citizens were investigated at the Iraqi Assistance Center in downtown Baghdad.

"There is no way to refute" such stories, said Robert Callahan, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. "All you can do is tell them the truth and hope it eventually will get through."

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