Carry On, Dan (CBS panel on journalistic fraud has extended rather than ended the fraud)

The American Prowler ^ | 1/11/2005 | George Neumayr

[nickcarraway]

George Neumayr Ping

[anton]

Where are Mapes e-mails?

[Lancey Howard]

Thanks for the ping!

[CurlyDave]

Actually CBS did wonders for the re-election of President Bush.

I think the backlash from the forged documents combined with the Swift Boat Vets is what pushed us over the top.

If CBS had not displayed such ineptitude & bias we might have had a harder time of it.

Of course they should still be punished for their crimes. And they were crimes.

[prophetic]

a corrupt & vile conspiracy against the Truth and the American people continues...

[Malleus Dei]

There was a deliberate attmept to bring down a sitting president using forged documents. Where is the federal investigation? Where are the indictments? People belong in prison over this.

If this had been tried on a Democrat the trials would already be underway.

[MEG33]

Brit asked that of powerline writer tonight..I guess itthe emails are in the addendum at the back of the report..
http://www.powerlineblog.com/
latest entry

[Lancey Howard]

So The Panel has concluded "that a Political Agenda Did Not Motivate the September 8 Segment". I was raised to understand that if you are caught in just one lie, you will never truly be trusted again. That one little section of the report has destroyed the credibility of the entire report. The report is not worth the paper it's printed on.

[MEG33]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1317710/posts
Full CBS Report on "RatherGate" (Long)
CBS News ^ | 1-10-2005 | CBS

[prfix]

Good piece. Saw it linked from here.

http://www.geocities.com/truthmasters/jointheboycott.htm

Perhaps expecting the media to be objective about the media is more than you can ask - hitting them in the pocketbook is the way to get the message across.

[MEG33]

NObody believes it was not motivated by political bias..It is the thing that will bring criticism to the report. Getting the scoop may have been a part but the bias is on the part of all the MSM pursuing the story..Rather's dem attachments were not examined...is my understanding.

[Lancey Howard]

This comes from Mary Mapes' statement:

"Much has been made about the fact that these documents are photocopies and therefore cannot be trusted, but decades of investigative reporting have relied on just such copies of memos, documents and notes."

Good Lord!
HOW MANY fake documents have been offered up by the socialist "old media" over the decades? How many lives and careers have been fraudulently and maliciously destroyed by these sloppy, partisan, liberal animals? We will never know. This admission by Mapes is the most chilling thing I have heard in the entire Rathergate scandal.

[oldbrowser]

But while Boccardi and Thornburgh are skeptical to the point of stupidity on the question of CBS's political bias, they have no problem dismissing those who first exposed the forgery as "bloggers with a conservative agenda.

This report is an insult to the American public. If the media let's this report go unchallenged we might as well not have a news media. We are not really getting any news from the MSM anyway and their stated purpose is to inform the public, so why do we have them ? I never thought I would see the day when the weather would be the most accurate part of the news.

[blondee123]

Freep the poll on CNN, (should D. Rather have been fired?)

http://www.cnn.com

Lower right hand corner of main page.

[Lancey Howard]

I assure you, this report will be a yoke around CBS's neck until they finally go out of business.

First, the "investigators" did not have the spine to do their job with regard to the forged memos. They needed to determine and state clearly that there could be no reasonable doubt that the memos were forged. Instead, they weaseled out:

"Although the panel said it couldn't prove conclusively the documents were forged, it said CBS News failed to authenticate them...."

That just doesn't cut it. "Gee, the memos could be real, but...."

Second, even though CBS was caught red-handed trying to fix a Presidential election by using forged military memos to support a one-sided, Bush-bashing hit-piece interview with a known Kerry fundraiser and political operative, CBS and "The Panel" maintain that CBS's attempt to fix the election for Kerry had no political agenda behind it. Say WHAT? This conclusion is utterly bizarre on the face of it. Again, The Panel failed miserably to investigate the liberal activist political histories of Rather and Mapes (among others) and state clearly what is obvious to nearly everybody - - yes, there certainly WAS "political bias". The Panel not only didn't have the spine to say it, they actually concluded the opposite! That is inexcusable.

So now we will see if Moonves has indeed learned the lesson that he claimed today in his memo that he learned from this episode. We will see if Moonves "circles the wagons" behind this disgraceful, squishy report or if he addresses the public's concerns about it immediately.

Moonves needs to do two things:
First, he needs to state clearly and unequivocally that it is the opinion of CBS that the memos are in all likelihood forgeries, regardless of The Panel's inability to reach (or state) that conclusion. If he needs another thorough analysis of the memos, then he better get it done. Yesterday.

Second, Moonves needs to state clearly and unequivocally that despite the conclusion of The Panel that political bias did not contribute to the airing of the segment, his own conclusion is different. He must admit publicly that he believes that there WAS the strong possibility that political bias was behind the airing of the segment.

Coming clean NOW is the only hope CBS has of truly beginning a recovery, if that is even still possible. Standing by this report and pretending that it puts the scandal behind them is a sure loser for Moonves and CBS.

[GOPcapitalist]

Burkett's about as much of a Republican - of ANY chromosome - as Sheila Jackson Lee. He's a Democrat activist who once described himself as one of only a tiny handful of Dems in the podunk town where he lives. He also helped manage the campaign of his friend and lawyer David Van Os for Democratic Party state chairman!

[MEG33]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/
The Thornburgh Report: What It Says, and What It Doesn't Say
snip
"Finally, on August 31, only eight days before the 60 Minutes show aired, at a time when Smith and Mapes were desperately trying to persuade Bill Burkett to give them the anti-Bush documents that they had heard he possessed, Smith sent an email to Mapes proposing that they set up a book deal for Burkett so that he could be paid in exchange for turning over the documents:

Today I am going to send the following hypothetical scenario to a reliable, trustable editor friend of mine...
What if there was a person who might have some information that could possibly change the momentum of an election but we needed to get an ASAP book deal to help get us the information? What kinds of turnaround payment schedules are possible, keeping in mind that the book probably could not make it out until after the election.


Mapes replied: "that looks good, hypothetically speaking, of course."

Change the momentum of an election? No political bias?

[tjg]

"I assure you, this report will be a yoke around CBS's neck until they finally go out of business."

You made a lot of good comments in your post. But they are directed at people that are interested in the facts and that doesn't include all the people that want to continue beliving what they like to belive. All those people will continue to watch Rather, (and Michael Moore), and I don't think CBS news is going anywhere.

[MEG33]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1318272/posts?page=1
"The panel," they say, "cannot conclude that a political agenda at '60 Minutes Wednesday' drove either the timing or the airing of the segment or its content."
"Too bad, because everybody else can." snip

ROFLOL!