Fax# (212) 975-1998
I just wrote my local CBS affiliate in Chattanooga TN with a nice but firm email. Hope the pressure filters upstream !
So what is two times zero?
From Powerline
http://www.powerlineblog.com/
Statement and translation
Andrew Heyward is the president of CBS News. Here's his statement today:
"We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television. There was a great deal of coroborating [sic] evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that's what we are doing."
Translation: CBS has played its cards; it holds none. CBS now undertakes efforts to discover evidence bolstering a story that has blown up in its face. Its efforts should be redirected to facing reality and acknowledging culpability. It is now at the least complicit in a fraud of monumental proportions. (Courtesy of NRO's Kerry Spot.)
HINDROCKET adds: Here is my theory. The documents are forged; we know it, CBS knows it, everyone knows it. So that is the context in which CBS is trying to figure out its next move. The general direction seems clear--they want to say that the documents may not be authentic, but the sentiments they reflect are true. So what they have "redoubled," in Heyward's words, is their longstanding effort to get the goods on President Bush's National Guard service. In short, they are going to retroactively try to create the story that they wanted, but couldn't get, and therefore settled for the forgeries.
Will it work? Yes, in the sense that they will be able to do something other than admit guilt, apologize, and fire Dan Rather. No, in that everyone will know that CBS prostituted itself to try to help John Kerry, and on one--that is, no one who is not already a virulent Bush hater--cares about Bush's National Guard service, especially given that 1) he flew fighter aircraft, which everyone admires, and 2) he completed his service and was honorably discharged.
URGENT UPDATE: Drudge is reporting--with the rotating red light--that the forged documents have been traced to a Kinko's in Texas. CBS may have run out of time.
FURTHER UPDATE: The Washington Post says that "there is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents." And it seems that Burkett has an account at the Kinko's in Abilene.
Posted by The Big Trunk at 05:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBack (19)
-> "There was a great deal of coroborating"
The 3 laws of corobotics:
1. Broadcaste corobots must never harm a leftwinger
2. Everyone else is fair game
3. Corobots are always right
Similar to what some earlier posters have done, let’s take a look- a very close look- at the Andrew Heyward’s first two sentences. The passage looks curiously clintonesque, like highly lawyered, finely parsed sophistry.
The first sentence,
…”We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television…”
could actually mean that CBS is “satisfied” with the forgery. Also, note the past tense. It might also mean that at one point in time, CBS established the accuracy of the memos; that is, before they realized they were forgeries and ran the story anyway. Or, even that their standards for “satisfaction” are so low, that forgeries are just fine.
The second sentence,
…”There was a great deal of coroborating [sic] evidence from people in a position to know…”
can be totally different from stating that the evidence was completely (or even adequately) corroborated. The corroborating evidence could have been long-since discredited, and still qualify for this particularly vague CBS sentence.
Also, I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I do think that the misspelling of the word “corroborate” is significant. When I have a misspelling in a document, it’s probably the last word I was playing with before saving the piece, and thus the most likely to be left out of a spell check. Following this line of logic, they were most worried about this one word. Perhaps, if we examine the synonyms of “corroborate” we find some clues. While corroborate can mean confirm, it can also mean the highly squishy terms “strengthen” or “support”.
And the subsequent phrase, “…people in a position to know.” is substantively different from writing “people who know.” Perhaps a two-dollar call to Madam Cleo might even meet Mssrs . Rather and Heyward’s vague evidence standards as described in this passage.
All are welcome to take these deliberations and musings farther. (Apologies to anyone who may have already posted any of these analyses. I haven’t read all of the related posts.)
"We've reached our political conclusions and we'll be damned if some pajama wearing yahoos on Free Republic are going to make us admit the forgeries are forgeries!"
To anyone interested in putting heat on CBS send an email to the following address. It's for the station manager at WFVR in Green Bay Wi. He is bundling them up to send on to CBS in New York. The station manager was very receptive, seemed frustrated that they are not having any impact on the CBS Politburo, but that "complaints from viewers help".
kidderp@wfvr.cbs.com
By the way I bet if we analyze the address we can guess Gunga Dans email address too.
BUMP
Is he really so divorced from reality he feels pushing forged documents is OK, if they support his preconceived notions?
No, that's not it.
What it is, is that the people who feed him the good stuff are out of power -- and that's the only talent he has. He feeds off those who use him. Heyward's shamed journalism and so has CBS.
Translation: "We really want to admit these were bogus and move on, but we've invested too much credibility so far."