My Letter to CBS

Below is what I sent CBS, Viacom, and my local station. It is important to tell the local station that you will switch to other local news providers for good if Rather is not gone. As an "old married man", I am not going to tell my wife which soap opera she should tape to watch after work. But new CBS entertainment programs will be ignored. This is their last chance. *********************************************************

Dan Rather needs to be taken off the air now. He was in charge of this attempt to influence the election to defeat the President by any means possible. None of the “sources” have any validity or proof, and that is ignoring the forged documents!

CBS News needs to try to regain some credibility. The way to do this is clean house and provide adult supervision to the operation. To do this, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes must leave CBS due to their exhibited bias, and Andrew Heyward should go for allowing this to happen. This must be done in the next few weeks. To allow Rather and Mapes to stay just continues CBS’s political bias. It was reported in USA Today that Mapes is STILL working on the Guard documents story to smear George W. Bush.

This is the third major instance that Dan Rather has presented stories that present his favored viewpoint on the Vietnam era without proof. One was the General Westmoreland story, which caused your libel insurer to drop the network. The other was the stories on “combat veterans” who will still so shattered by their war experiences that they were living in the woods because they could no longer handle society. It was later proven that most of these men had not been to Vietnam, but had spent a good time of their service career in the stockade or brig for repeated AWOL. A man claimed to have witnessed another sailor caught by an airplane propeller – and that it haunts him all the time. This man was getting almost $2,000 a month in disability, but was shown to not have witnessed the accident.

If Rather and Mapes are not gone from CBS in the next few weeks, then all hope for the rehabilitation of the reputation for the network is gone. If Rather and Mapes are not gone from CBS in the next few weeks, then all viewing of CBS presented news, both local and national will stop. Other news outlets will be viewed. For unique events, like the local NFL game, and my wife’s soap operas, you still have us. But where there is a choice, that choice will not be CBS. This decision is not open to review – you will have lost a customer for life.

I grew up watching CBS National News with Walter Cronkite and Channel 6 news in Lansing, MI. But if integrity is not brought to the network very soon – a few weeks before the election, there will not be CBS News or new entertainment shows viewed in this house.

I have been a stockholder of what is now Viacom for over thirty years. It pains me to see my investment drop, but integrity is worth more than a few shekels. If CBS wants to retain a large part of its viewership, it must get Rather off the air now.

Good one! Here's the one I wrote the CBS affiliate in Austin, yesterday (Tim Gardner is the news director):

Dear KEYE,

Tim Gardner's statement concerning CBS's latest attempt to sabotage our
Presidential election this Nov. is quite fake and full of lies. You really
think your viewers/readers are THAT dumb, to believe Mr. Gardner's tripe?
Here's a howler from the statement :

"At KEYE News, we come to work every day trying our very best to fairly ,
accurately-- and without bias-- report on the news that affects you. We
always will."

Did Dan Rather write that one? You claim that you report WITHOUT bias?
Then why haven't you been hammering out articles concerning the fact that
John Kerry has NOT signed Form-180 which authorizes the Pentagon to release
ALL of his military records into the public domain? To simplify things for
you, why don't you investigate what Mssr. Kerry is probably hiding by not
releasing his military records? Why isn't KEYE trying to educate voters on
who exactly John Kerry is? A good start for that one would be a 3-5 part
series discussing his record in the senate. Of course, that would reflect
very negatively on Mssr. Kerry, so I guess I just answered my own question.

The claim that CBS doesn't tell you what to report is patently false. You
echo the exact same headlines as your mother company. And that, to me, is
the biggest shame of all. You are supposed to be a local news organization;
instead you parrot the daily DNC talking points. Go back and research how
many articles you've written concerning President Bush's Natl. Guard
service, and then compare that to how many articles you've written detailing
John Kerry's "testimony" to the US Senate in 1971, accusing his comrades of
many horrible war crimes while the war in Vietnam was still engaged!
Perhaps you could also talk about his role in the Winter Soldier mess.

Bottom line : KEYE needs to apologize to President Bush and his family for
slandering him for over a week on this issue. KEYE also needs to PROFUSELY
apologize to the Killian family.

Best Regards,

cweese

Dan Rather would rather climb a tree to tell a lie about Republicans than stand on the ground and tell the truth.

The truth, as Mark Steyn noted, is that John Kerry is a walking parody of the limosine liberal Democrat who has done nothing for we-the-people in "thirty years of 'public' service."

And the truth is that the Republican Party is the party, not of the rich, but of the middle class.

A Reply from WLNS, my local CBS station...

...Your letter was one of many responses the station has received from viewers both here and around the country. Many of the responses expressed viewpoints similar to yours and those resopnses have not gone unnoticed by CBS, as evidenced by the actions taken by CBS News this week to conduct a thorough investigation of the situation.

The lessons from this incident have not been lost on us here at WLNS. Even though our news department is seperate from CBS News and maintains its own standards, we've taken the time to reemphisize to our producrers, anchors and reporters our insistence of accruacy above all else. Our viewers trust us, and we can't be trusted if we don't get the story right. Trust is the cornerstone of the relationship between the station and its viewers; violate that trust, as CBS did to you and many other viewers, and you lose them.

...I hope we don't lose you as a viewer. However I do understand your feelings. Thanks for sharing them with me.

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