Bias, what bias?!
Posted on 01/15/2005 8:32:57 AM PST by izzatzo
AFTER SPENDING THREE MONTHS ON an investigation that must have rung up hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable hours, the team of lawyers hired by CBS to investigate its scandalously spurious report about George W. Bush's long-ago National Guard service finally concluded last week that CBS shouldn't have aired the September 8 broadcast at all. Former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief Louis D. Boccardi, who led the investigative panel, declared that there had simply been too many questions about the veracity of the supposedly bombshell documents on which it relied. (Cont.)
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
I would have been glad to tell them the same thing for Free.
Bias, what bias?!
Former attorney general Dick Thornburgh may be a cautious enough lawyer to want to avoid writing a report directly accusing Blather et. al. of felony conspiracy and CBS News of being a criminal enterprise. Which is what the body of the report might lead the unbiased reader to conclude.
It took them four months to comr to THIS conclusion? I thought this was a well established fact with a week or so of the event.
So now there are only four people on the planet who don't believe these documents were fakes: Rather, Thornburgh, Boccardi, and Moore.
The Report itself is located here, all 234 pages in PDF format.
There was no bias involved in the affair because, as the report explicitly states, both Mapes and Rather said so! I consider that to be a judge taking a defendant at face value when he says 'not guilty' and simply dismissing the case!
Finally, the report wouldn't even go on record to say that the documents were forgeries, after a three month investigation, when, in contrast, amateur analysts in the blogosphere correctly spotted them as fake almost within minutes of their release.
Rather keeps his job and is allowed to bow out gracefully while the underlings take the heat and get fired, although I bet they all land on their feet. I am hopeful there will be further fallout for CBS: falling ratings, an earlier departure for Dan, the cancellation of the Wednesday 60 MINUTES, and whatever else the market can throw against them!
"Former attorney general Dick Thornburgh may be a cautious enough lawyer to want to avoid writing a report directly accusing Blather et. al. of felony conspiracy and CBS News of being a criminal enterprise. Which is what the body of the report might lead the unbiased reader to conclude."
Okay, if you're accusing me of bias in your last sentence of the above quote, I'll 'fess up-you bet, I am biased with respect to this entire Rathergate/Memogate affair. My bias is this: The whole thing was cooked up by Rather/Mapes, after five years of effort, and presented less than two months before the general election in order to have an impact on the election. They wanted a Republican presidential notch on the handle of their media six-shooter. I think, in Rather's case, he would consider it his second notch.
As for the balance of your paragraph, the content is a given; but, is that what you wanted in this case? Did you want a "cautious lawyer" executing a cautious investigation, arriving at no conclusion other than one, the results of which were already common public knowledge? And, ultimately, just providing cover for an organization and certain members thereof. If that's what you wanted, that's what you got.
Another of my biases is this: this affair belongs in the criminal court system.
On the matter of liberal bias in the mainstream media, Thornburgh and Boccardi chose to conclude that they did "not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias." In this way, they sought to continue CBS's effort at plausible deniability, which was very nice of them but also profoundly stupid of them. In the end, they come off like Jimmy Durante in the legendary scene in the 1935 Broadway spectacular Billy Rose's Jumbo, in which the great comedian was caught trying to sneak a real live elephant off stage.
"What are you doing with that elephant?" a policeman demanded.
"Elephant?" Durante replied. "What elephant?" [Emphasis added.]
This article by Podhoretz is the most clear-headed and complete report I have seen on the CBS cover-up. I downloaded and saved it. Podhoretz is a national treasure.
It would be nice if John Ashcroft's parting shot as AG was to initiate legal action against CBS for this intentional act to throw the presidency to Kerry.
Nah, he's bowing out in disgrace, and everyone knows it, including Blather.
I'm not sure how "cautious" he actually is.
It should be noted, that in this story, which regarded Bush, Dick Thornburgh once got sued by a current Bush advisor, and lost.
The Person who sued Dick Thornburgh, and won, was a Mr. Karl Rove.
Lotsa folks trying to make hay out of the connection of Thornburgh et al to cbs. IMO, since this panel has more the appearance of an internal audit, I don't think there's a whole lot more we would expect for public consumption.
Prosecutors, start your engines?
FGS
bump^ tx for the ping, FGS
bttt
FGS
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