Mold is right! CBS can be fairly described as mold in news. 
All we need is the CBS eye in the above picture.
Posted on 11/01/2005 6:33:04 AM PST by Cindy_Cin
The new president of CBS News wants to revive the network's news operation, but according to some analysts, he must first overcome two major obstacles: boredom and bias.
Shawn McManus, head of CBS Sports since 1996, was named president of CBS News on Oct. 28 by Les Moonves, the head of parent company Viacom, and instructed to "break the mold in news."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
geez this is bad- when going back to 'old fashioned' unbiased reporting of news (as opposed to fabricating news) is considered to be earth-shattering news that shakes them up so.
He can break the mold, break convention, break any damn thing he wants.....I quit watching CBS (EVERY program) when Blather lied about the Guard story and the executives white-washed their 'investigation.'
Then quit telling lies and making up stuff if you want to get ahead of the others. Also, Get rid of Damn Blather.
Fake but Accurate.
ROFLMAO
I don't watch anything on CBS....very untrustworthy.
If we had the internet in 1988, Dan Rather's career would have been over when his first blatant contrivance was exposed after he paid fake Vietnam vets to read a script he prepared for them saying they had committed atrocities.
I remember that, but wasn't CNN also involved in that?
yeah, the leftie-news-bias has gotten a bit moldy.
They have a long way back to get to unbiased reporting. Walter Cronkite and the near dead crew at 6o minutes lead the way in bias. Now Mike Wallace is touting his book and crowing about all of his "Gotcha" years.
DRUDGE - CBS REPORTER TO WHITE HOUSE: ALITO '***** SECONDS?' ^
If not fire his *ss.
CBS executives deny they have any political bias...
-----
Yes, and the world is flat...when will the LIES stop?
Mold is right! CBS can be fairly described as mold in news.
All we need is the CBS eye in the above picture.
On June 2, 1988, CBS aired an hour-long special titled CBS Reports: The Wall Within, which CBS trumpeted as the "rebirth of the TV documentary." It purported to tell the true story of Vietnam through the eyes of six of the men who fought there. And what terrible stories they had to tell.
"I think I was one of the highest trained, underpaid, eighteen-cent-an-hour assassins ever put together by a team of people who knew exactly what they were looking for," said Steve Southards, a Navy SEAL who told Rather he had escaped society to live in the forests of Washington state. Under Rather's gentle coaxing, Southards described slaughtering Vietnamese civilians, making his work appear to be that of the North Vietnamese.
"You're telling me that you went into the village, killed people, burned part of the village, then made it appear that the other side had done this?" Rather asked.
"Yeah," Steve replied. "It was kill VC, and I was good at what I did."
Steve arrived home "in a straitjacket, addicted to alcohol and drugs" knowing that "combat had made him different," Rather intoned. "He asked for help; that's unusual, many vets don't. They hold back until they explode."
Rather then moved on to suicidal veteran named George Grule, who was stationed on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga off the coast of Vietnam during a secret mission. Grule described the horror of watching a friend walk into the spinning propeller of a plane, which chopped him to pieces and sprayed Grule with his blood. The memory of this trauma left Grule, like Steve, unable to function in normal society.
Neither could Mikal Rice, who broke down as he described a grenade attack at Cam Ranh Bay, which blew in half the body of a buddy, "Sergeant Call." "He died in my arms," Rice tearfully recalled. Rice described how the sound of thunder and cars backfiring would regularly trigger his terrible memories.
Most horrific of all were the memories of Terry Bradley, a "fighting sergeant" who told Rather he had skinned alive 50 Vietnamese men, women, and children in one hour and stacked their bodies in piles. "Could you do this for one hour of your life, you stack up every way a body could be mangled, up into a body, an arm, a tit, an eyeball . . . Imagine us over there for a year and doing it intensely," Bradley said. "That is sick."
"You've got to be angry about it," Rather replied. "I'm suicidal about it," Bradley responded.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, drug abuse, alcoholism, joblessness, homelessness, suicidal thoughts: These tattered warriors suffered from them all.
The The Wall Within was hailed by critics who — like the Washington Post's Tom Shales — gushed that the documentary was "extraordinarily powerful." There was just one problem: Almost none of it was true.
The truth was uncovered by B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran and author of Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (with Glenna Whitley). Burkett discovered that only one of the vets had actually served in combat. Steve Southards, who'd claimed to be a 16-year-old Navy SEAL assassin, had actually served as an equipment repairman stationed far from combat. Later transferred to Subic Bay in the Philippines, Steve spent most of his time in the brig for repeatedly going AWOL.
And George Gruel, who claimed he was traumatized by the sight of his friend being chopped to pieces by a propeller? Navy records reveal that a propeller accident did take place on the Ticonderoga when Gruel was aboard — but that he wasn't around when it happened. During Gruel's tour, the ship had been converted to an antisubmarine warfare carrier which operated, not on "secret mission" along the Vietnam coast, but on training missions off the California coastline. Nevertheless, Burkett notes, Gruel receives $1,952 a month from the Veterans Administration for "psychological trauma" related to an event he only heard about.
Mikal Rice — the anguished vet who claimed to have cradled his dying buddy in his arms — actually spent his tour as a guard with an MP company at Cam Ranh Bay. He never saw combat. Neither did Terry Bradley, who was not the "fighting sergeant" he'd claimed to be. Instead, military records reveal he served as an ammo handler in the 25th Infantry Division and spent nearly a year in the stockade for being AWOL. That's good news for the hundreds of Vietnamese civilians Bradley claimed to have slaughtered. But it doesn't say much for Dan Rather's credibility.
As Burkett notes, the records of all of these vets were easily checkable through Freedom of Information Act requests of their military records — something Rather and his producers simply didn't bother to do. They accepted at face value the lurid tales of atrocities committed in Vietnam and the stories of criminal behavior, drug addiction, and despair at home.
Perhaps that's because this is what they wanted to believe. Says Burkett: The Wall Within "precisely fit what Americans have grown to believe about the Vietnam War and its veterans: They routinely committed war crimes. They came home from an immoral war traumatized, vilified, then pitied. Jobless, homeless, addicted, suicidal, they remain afflicted by inner conflicts, stranded on the fringes of society."
Burkett, who did check the records of the vets Rather interviewed, shared his discoveries with CBS. So did Thomas Turnage, then administrator of the Veterans Administration, who was appalled by Rather's use of bogus statistics on the rates of suicide, homelessness, and mental illness among Vietnam veterans — statistics that can also be easily checked. Rather initially refused to comment, and CBS spokeswoman Kim Akhtar said, "The producers stand behind their story. They had enough proof of who they are." For his part, CBS president Howard Stringer defended the network with irrelevancies. "Your criticisms were not shared by a vast majority of our viewers," he sniffed, adding that "CBS News and its affiliates received acclaim from most quarters . . . In sum, this was a broadcast of which we at CBS News and I personally am proud. There are no apologies to make."
Sarah Lee Pilley, who ran a restaurant in Colville, Washington where the CBS crew dined while filming The Wall Within, would not agree. The wife of a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who saw combat in Vietnam, Pilley, said she "got the distinct feeling that CBS had a story they had decided on before they left New York." After interviewing 87 Vietnam veterans, CBS chose the "four or five saddest cases to put on the film," Pilley said. "The factual part of it didn't seem to matter as long as they captured the high drama and emotion that these few individuals offered. We felt all along that CBS committed tremendous exploitation of some very sick individuals."
Why would Dan Rather do such a thing? Partly because the stories of deranged, trip-wire vets is much more dramatic than the true story: That most Vietnam veterans came home to live normal, productive, happy lives. Second, Rather apparently wanted the story of whacked-out Vietnam veterans to be true — just as he now wants the Jerry Killian story to be true.
Or maybe — despite a preponderance of the evidence — he considered the sources of these tales of Vietnam atrocities "unimpeachable." As angry Vietnam veterans began calling CBS to complain about the factual inaccuracies of The Wall Within, Perry Wolff, the executive producer who wrote the documentary, claimed that "No one has attacked us on the facts." Despite the growing evidence that he'd been had, Rather also continued to defend the documentary — which is now part of CBS's video history series on the Vietnam War.
Perhaps Vietnam veterans ought to take a page out of the book of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and air television ads exposing Rather's deceits — something along the lines of: "Dan Rather lied about his Vietnam documentary. I know. I was there. I saw what happened. When the chips were down, you could not count on Dan Rather."
Certainly, we cannot count on him for the truth. During a 1993 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, Rather criticized his colleagues for competing with entertainment shows for "dead bodies, mayhem, and lurid tales." "We should all be ashamed of what we have and have not done, measured against what we could do," Rather said.
UnFreakingBelievable!
The email I received in response to my objection to the use of "sloppy seconds" to describe Alito:
Thank you for writing to CBS regarding the October 31st morning White House press briefing. John Roberts has issued an apology for his language at that briefing:
"At the morning White House gaggle, I used an unfortunate choice of words in a question to Scott McClellan. Please be assured that there was no pejorative intent to my question. I was merely attempting to reconcile past statements about Harriet Miers with the President's new nominee for the Supreme Court.
The early morning White House gaggle is an informal, free-wheeling and often irreverent forum, which is not broadcast and generally not publicly available.
Obviously, my tone this morning was a little too casual.
As we all experience from time to time, it was one of those 'oops' moments which we wish we could rewind and re-record.
I apologize to anyone who took offense to my poor choice of words. I can assure you I meant none."
CBS has posted additional details on our Public Eye website. You can visit this Public Eye entry at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2005/10/31/publiceye/entry997460.shtml
In the meantime, please be assured that the comments you have expressed will be shared with the senior executives at CBS News.
Cordially,
Ray Faiola
Director,
CBS Audience Services
This is a story that should never be allowed to die. When ever someone cites CBS as saying anything, this should be thrown in their face.
Has anyone noticed that the name of the president of CBS News is an acronym for what CBS needs to improve its credibility?
President of CBS News: Leslie Moonves
What CBS News needs: Less Move-on lie
If CBS took a center/right position, similar to FoxNEWS, they would land half the broadcast news market overnight. The fact that they refuse to do so shows they are more beholden to their bias than to the shareholders.
Ah,the old "non-apology" apology.
If anyone is offended it is their own fault for being offended.
That is an absolute fact. It seems so simple, but alas, it is their sacred religion that they cling to.
What kills me is that ivory tower people have the big example of success in front of their faces, FOX News. Yet out of their own partisanship they prefer to rearrange the chairs on the titanic instead of making real change and eliminating the extreme and noticable liberal bias.
Mary Mapes still believes the SeeBS 60 minutes was true.
Mary Mapes is a glowing example of a talentless and politically driven network media slacker.
I did that when Letterman had Bill Clinton on a year after the 9/11 attacks.
I didn't see that, but probably would have done the same thing then.....
McManus is a jock (son of Jim McKay). I bet the geezers start bailing out soon rather than work for a jock.
......I bet the geezers start bailing out soon rather than work for a jock......
This business of Geezers is the root of the problem. The audience is old and might not accept any change. The loss of Geezer staff seems likely as you have noted.
Most importantly, CBS can not continue to fund a decent news organization that can actually compete on a daily basis with a half hour format. They can't squeeze enough ads into the limited time to pay for an organization that can compete with cable news. The handwriting is on the wall.......DOOM
It can be easily done, report the TRUTH without BIAS.
Naah, it’d never work…
If he's Jim McKay's son, why is he called McManus?
Why doesn't Fox News go with a nightly newscast and clean their clocks before one of them figures it out?
I agree, put Brit's News on the regular over the air Fox channel and compete head on.
It would be a knife in the heart of the old media. It would be like the Voice of America to the non-cable people, and to those who think FNC is a bunch of whack jobs and don't watch it. Brit Hume they know and trust.
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