Replies

In a series of interviews and in the 224 pages of the independent panel's report

That's part of the whitewash - the role that the bulk of the rest of the MSM is playing here. Very few are even questioning the term "independent panel" - when the panel was, as you noted, hardly independent and instead beholded to protect CBS's interests.

And there were two possible findings that could have led to criminal or civil investigations - that the documents were fraudulent and that the CBS employees deliberately tried to sway the election. Which is why the panel avoided reaching those conclusions despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

One little problem. Thornburg works for CBS ... he is their lawyer. And if he finds bias on the part of the network, he has opened up his own client to litigation. Major conflict of interest.

Bears repeating. Once that the cat was out of the bag that the Memogate story was blatently fake, CBS's legal strategy (in hindsight) appears to be:

A) Announce an internal investigation
B) Hope that GWB would win
C) Hope that GWB's "new tone" would not prompt future legal action against CBS. Remember, he's the only one with standing and potential damages.

If GWB did sue CBS, they have points A, B (no actual damages), and the 1st amendment to start undermining any case. The rest of the MSM would rally behind CBS during the trial and it would be a big distraction from anything GWB want's to get done.

One little problem. Thornburg works for CBS ... he is their lawyer. And if he finds bias on the part of the network, he has opened up his own client to litigation.

Yep.

"The Panel" was apparently directed to whitewash the scandal because if they had reached the same crystal-clear conclusion as everybody else - - that political bias was the reason that CBS used forged military documents to try to fix a national election - - then there would be no way for CBS to avoid a criminal investigation and no way for the Justice Department to look the other way.

The report was, in fact, carefully crafted to shield the network from further investigation (and prosecution). In too-clever-by-half fashion, all aspects of the report which did not deal with the forgeries and CBS's political agenda were beefed up to try to make the report look "hard-hitting", "devastating", "crushing" etc. To add a nice finishing touch, CBS fired a few hapless underlings (while stammering through lame excuses for why they gave Rather and Heyward a pass) in order to further show everybody just how "serious" they were.

No wonder Heyward's promise of a full and thorough investigation and report in "weeks, not months" took nearly four months to produce - - there was a mountain of careful parsing and legal work involved in crafting the whitewash.

Nobody's buying, of course, but the dirty work was handled with brazen aplomb. There's really nothing in the report that Justice can get its hands around. And that was the idea from the beginning.