In a public rebuke of a rival network's news judgment that was rare for its bluntness, NBC Universal Television Group President Jeff Zucker said NBC News had learned its lesson from a discredited report on automobile safety aired by "Dateline NBC" in the early 1990s.
Asked about the recent CBS News gaffe at NBC's annual winter presentation to TV critics, Zucker said, "Nothing like that could have gotten through at any level (at NBC) because of the safeguards that we instituted more than a decade ago."
Good ping, PGalt.Oh good. They're eating their own.
I think this NBC response should be filed right next to the CBS "investigation" of Rathergate.The CBS "investigation" made a show of roundly criticizing the "Killian memo" report and scapegoated some CBS employees, but it had no other purpose than to promote an infinite standard of proof on the "question" of political bias at CBS News (It was in service to that objective that the CBS "investigation" found it "too hard" to come to a conclusion on the validity of those forged documents). Likewise NBC scapegoats CBS when it claims that it is far above such chicanery as
using forged documentsplanting an incindiary in a gas tank in order to "prove" a vehicle's lack of crashworthiness.This is the obvious response to the egregious tendentiousness not merely of CBS's failure to vet the transparent forgeries but even of the effort, at that late date, to find those "documents" - given that Bush had signed Standard Form 180, and CBS was helping Kerry stonewall on that issue while claiming to have revealed his entire military record. NBC criticizes CBS far less sharply than the facts warrant.
NBC really, really doesn't want to start a flame war within "objective" journalism. After all, CBS was not alone in stonewalling for Kerry; NBC
wasis right there with all the rest of "objective" journalism in stonewalling the SBVT.NBC Execs Slam CBS for Handling of Bush Report
Reuters via Yahoo! ^ | January 21, 2005 | Steve Gorman