CBS Borrows Some Whitewash From The NY Times
By Richard Davis (01/12/05)
All you need to know about the Thornburgh report on the CBS Memogate scandal can be found in a single sentence on page 211: “The Panel does not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the segment of having a political bias.” Only a panel with a bias of its own could write that.
The CBS investigators thus follow the precedent set by the “independent” commission hand-picked by The New York Times last year to study its own scandal involving plagiarist Jason Blair. That is, you tell the Big Lie. Every person involved, including the investigators, know the truth, but since not a single one can or will admit it, they all affirm the lie, which becomes the public truth.
In the Times case it was affirmative action and the company’s out-of-control diversity practices. Even Blair himself laid the blame there. But there was no way the Times was going to find diversity guilty of anything. And so the investigative report became literally a paean to affirmative action and a loud call for more diversity hiring.
With CBS it’s political bias. There’s no doubt that for CBS executives, especially Dan Rather, that sentence on page 211means more than the rest of the report combined. Had the panel told the truth there, it would have forced the organization and Rather to admit what they have vociferously denied for too long. Regrettably, that might have provoked genuine soul searching and change. Instead, Thornburgh deliberately allowed Rather and CBS to save face, truth be damned. The panel handed CBS a clean slate and a mandate to continue business as usual.
The refusal of two of the nation’s liberal news behemoths to face the truth forthrightly isn’t surprising. These two are near the top of almost everyone’s list of the most biased. Still, we shouldn’t underestimate the public effect of this type of corporate dissembling, especially from our press. If they won’t hold themselves accountable, how can we trust them to tell the truth about anything?
Both the Times and CBS reports are filled with sanctimonious blather about principles and standards, while the report writers openly subordinate truth to politics. In the CBS case, they literally perpetrate the exact offense they’re investigating, the dissemination for political purposes of information they know or should know is false. The message to journalists and others is clear--it’s all political.
And don’t be fooled into believing CBS wasn’t motivated primarily by its liberal Democratic agenda. No reasonable person examining the CBS scandal could absolve all participants of political bias. That defies even common sense. In fact the panel offers no evidence whatsoever to support its conclusion, other than the denials of the principals involved.
What was this story after all if not a political smear job? No other rationale is even imaginable. We‘re talking about a tired allegation that George Bush shirked some of his National Guard duty 35 years ago--a charge supported by documents and assurances of Bush haters, broadcast a few weeks before the election and timed to coincide precisely with a Democratic ad campaign featuring the same smear.
Perhaps the worse effect of the Thornburgh report is that it detracts from the real issue, which is that a major US news organization, an arm of one of America‘s largest corporations, colluded with felons in an attempt to bring down the president of the United States. That’s a little more than just a problem of “myopic zeal.” Now that the whitewash is out of the way, let a real investigation begin.
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