Posted on 10/12/2009 6:07:22 PM PDT by La Lydia
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Bush administration says it's treating CBS New as a political opponent, and executives at the top-rated news network are responding that the White House can't tell straight reporting from opinion. White House communications director Karen Hughes recently told Time magazine that she thinks CBS offers "opinion journalism masquerading as news," and kept up the criticism on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday and in The New York Times Monday.
CBS News president Sean McManus issued a statement Monday, saying: "It's astounding the White House can't distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part."
And CBS's senior vice president for programming, Glenn Geller, told the Times every time the White House criticizes the network, "our ratings go up."
While McManus maintained that the White House unfairly mixes its perception of the network's reporters and its pundits — whom he compares to "the op-ed page of a newspaper" — Hughes says she does indeed differentiate between White House correspondent Mark Knoller "the opinion guys" such as Jeff Greenfield and Nicole Wallace, "I'm talking about the overall programming," she explains.
The Times reported that the White House recently limited administration members' appearances on CBS News. Last month, when President Bush himself made the rounds of Sunday morning talk shows, he skipped CBS. That provoked CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schiefer to call the Bush administration "the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington."
Hughes says people from the administration would still talk to CBS and that Obama was likely to be interviewed on the network in the future. But, she says: "We're not going to legitimize them as a news organization."
On Monday, CBS did a comprehensive report about the battle and harkened back to when President Richard Nixon wanted to freeze out The New York Times....
Shortly before the 2004 election, CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes about a series of memos critical of President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service record that had supposedly been discovered in the personal files of Lt. Bush's former commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. The authenticity of these documents was quickly called into question, initially because they were proportionally printed and displayed other modern typographic conventions unavailable on military typewriters of the time. This led to claims that the memos were forgeries. The accusations then spread over the following days into mainstream media outlets.
Rather and CBS initially defended the story, insisting that the documents had been authenticated by experts. CBS was contradicted by some of the experts it originally cited. CBS later reported that their source for the documents, former Texas Army National Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, had misled the network about how he had obtained them.
Following an investigation commissioned by CBS,the network fired story producer Mary Mapes and asked three other producers connected with the story to resign. Rather has not yet apologized.
Still having problems with your punctuation, but your reading and spelling skills are vastly improved.
March 5, 2005
This article was published today, and appeared on TV Guide’s website
.........
At least get your story straight.
He was unpopular, as you put it, with the State Run Media from the get-go!
Not true. GWB got more favorable treatment in the 2000 election than Al Gore. Much of it Gore deserved for acting like a arrogant idiot but it blows that myth. I also saw some (much less) MSM ripping of Kerry in the 2004 election. ABC Nightline really gave it to Kerry for being a phony and reported he kicked them off his jet.
Yes the MSM is liberal and was brutal on GWB in later years , and treats liberal AA Obama as the return of Christ. The treatment is like day and night.
But GWB brought it on himself, and us. He set himself up to be crusified. Let me give you hints, "WMDs", "Mushroom Clouds over America", "Iraq Oil will pay for reconstruction", "political capital". This was like giving the media a loaded gun and begging them to shoot him, and they did.
Call it Neo-con train-wreck. We cannot let this happen again.
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