If they simply presented unbiased, objective and factual reporting, they wouldn't be in the mess they are in, and wouldn't need a "nonbudsman." They just need a fact checker and honest reporters, not liberal hacks like Rather and Mapes.
It will be a long time before I stop reflexively changing the channel when I see Schieffer's face or the CBS logo.....
I don't think you understand the situation. The fundamental problem is story selection - what is the lead, what makes the cut, and what isn't reported at all. Consideringwould the "memos" have logically been important even if they were absolutely genuine? Would it have been "objective" to call them a smoking gun, when all they putatively "prove" is that Bush wasn't the second coming of Audie Murphy - something which Bush himself never claimed?
- Kerry's book, Winter Soldier, and the rest of his quisling act back in the Vietnam era,
- Kerry's negative military expenditure votes in the Senate, and
- Kerry's dismissal of the "what did you do in the war?" issue when the Democrats were electing a draft dodger in 1992,
I'm not arguing that they wouldn't have likely suppressed the Bush vote enough to turn the election if the blogosphere and talk radio hadn't put the kibosh on them - I think they probably would. But that begs the question - why would an objective person think it was their job to promote the Kerry political line?
Just turn it around. Suppose that there was information about Kerry that was exactly as derrogatory as those "memos," but it was about John Kerry. Would CBS have aired it, and would it have affected the election? That's not a hypothetical question, of course - the answer is the book Unfit for Command by O'Neil and the other members of the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." If 60 Minutes had breathlessly touted it they way they did the "memos," there would have been no doubt at all as to the outcome of the election. Instead CBS and the rest of the "objective" journalists pretended to give SBVT a hearing, then announced that they had been "discredited." And even so, SBVT is credited with the defeat of Kerry in Ohio.
The idea of "objectivity" is absurd when story selection determines the political slant of your reporting. Which is why the First Amendment is so elegant - and why the government was wrong to create the "titles of nobility" known as broadcast licenses.
Cindy Sheehan, Rush Limbaugh, and CBS
August 22, 2005 | conservatism_IS_compassion