The Rathergate report [pdf] must have been a shade touchy for some loyal BBC scribe to report. Replacing a name here, a circumstance there could easily conjure images the Beeb would prefer to forget. It’s a bit ironic to read the following:
The internal investigation received widespread coverage in the US media, which has been battered by a series of media scandals in the last two years at such major newspapers as the New York Times and USA Today. [And we won’t mention any battered media institutions on the other side of the pond, will we.]
“The 224-page report, which blames the network’s rush on a ‘myopic zeal’ [Now where have we seen that before?] to be first with the Bush story, amounts to a stunning repudiation of the newsgathering process of CBS News,” wrote Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. The US media hit CBS hard in the wake of the investigation The New York Times wrote: “Already under duress from years of budget cuts, poor ratings and reduced influence [The Beeb feels your pain…well, except the budget cut part.], CBS News suffered a crushing blow to its credibility yesterday because of a broadcast that has now been labelled as both factually discredited and unprofessionally produced.”
The Boston Globe called the investigation “a scathing independent post-mortem that describes the story’s journalistic failings“. [Lord Hutton led the way.]
So, are fossilized old media BBChemoths capable of learning anything? The perils and punishments for prejudicial ‘journalists’ who refuse to let the facts get in the way of a good story can be painfully public. As Yogi Berra used to say– “It’s deja vu all over again.”
“You’re confusing two things TGORK – the point I was making was that 100% of UK TV owners are compelled to pay the BBC for their ‘product’, yet, on the figures you state, clearly the BBC isn’t that popular if, given that it’s already paid for, it only commands a miserable and decling 27% audience share.”
For the sake of clarity those figures refer to BBC1 vs ITV1. The Beeb channels combined get about 40% of the audience share.
For what it’s worth I don’t really see what all the fuss about re: George and his military record. Politician dodges draft/generally irks his responsibilities is hardly a shocker is it? How many politicians would have the guts to serve in the armed forces? Not many, I would surmise. If you wanted to nail Bush I’m sure his ‘entrepreneur’ past might yield more juicy scandal.
We have not yet seen the end of Rathergate. Proceedings have started with the Federal Election Commission to try to bring CBS to book – and at the very least there could be some more stuff turned up in discovery of internal documents. And there could also be a Congressional enquiry – with power to summon witnesses. There are signs of collusion with the Dem party machine and Kerry’s campaign. The whitewash has not worked. Denial of bias, and refusal to call the documents fake (in spite of Appendix 4 to the report that makes it clear as daylight) will not be swept under the carpet. Meanwhile Rather and CBS remain discredited. All it needed was one queruous or conserviative voice to challenge the docs – but CBS employs mostly liberals. Same as the BBC.
The bizaar thing with the Rathergate report is that it lays out the evidence in a very clear and accurate manner but then when it comes to bias and the issue of forgery it applies a level of standard of evidence that is far higher than applied in every other area. It is indeed an attempted whitewash, in terms of conclusions anyway.
You are all drinking the same juice. Rather may be a bit biased. I have not watched him in years. He did blow it on this report by stating the document itself was real it was not, but the facts were right. As a journalism student I admired Rather’s tenacity. He was as good as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, you remember them, maybe, the reporters who discovered Nixon was behind a break-in. Living in the states I don’t know enough about the BBC to comment about their news. News is supposed to be the government watchdog, so naturally it is going to look as though they are against the establishment. Politicians on both sides are less than honest.
“He was as good as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein”
Misanthrope • the fact-checking of the “memogate” story was nonexistent.
Nineteen minutes after the CBS broadcast began, someone posted on the Free Republic board that the documents were not in the style of the USAF. After four hours, the word was out that the CBS memos used a proportionally spaced font, whereas typewriters of the early seventies used monospaced fonts.
If it took a bunch of people in pyjamas just minutes to smell something fishy about the story and just a few hours to totally demolish it then Rather is not in Woodward or Bernstein’s class.
Misanthrope
Get your head out of your arse. “Rather may be a bit biased. I have not watched him in years.” Well allow me to suggest the obvious; that you watch him before passing comment. And yes, I have CBS here and he is very biased. Try http://www.ratherbiased.com/
“News is supposed to be the government watchdog, so naturally it is going to look as though they are against the establishment.” First, don’t have such a high opinion of journalists. In any civilsed society free citizens are the government watchdog. Read your Constitution, the power is yours. Second, in the UK the BBC is very much a part of the left liberal establishment. The spat over Hutton was a family fued. The man who finally fell (Dyke, the BBC Director General) was a longstanding Labour Party supporter and donor.
I agree. He was once upon a time a good reporter, but he probably never was in their league.
Another train of legal actions that will help us get closer to the facts of CBS bias – the emails etc – will be the wrongful dismissal suits about to hit CBS. Heywood will get the chop in the end, and Rather will be even more discredited. It was his bias that made him sloppy, made him run with the obsessive Mates story. A story that was cold, old “news”, Boxing-Day turkey leftovers. And that same bias made CBS attack the Swift Boat Veterans ad hominem and fail to go after the REAL stories that they were declaring. REAL eye-openers about Kerry, not rehashed old stuff about Bush.
JohninLondon, the Swift Boat Veterans are a discredit group that is upset that Kerry had the strength to speak out against the war crimes committed in Vietnam. No one should believe in their country right or wrong. If they are wrong than they are wrong. Thankfully our countries are more right than wrong, but both have their problems and bad leaders.
Misantrope Kerry shot himself in the foot over Vietnam in the way he portrayed himself. And let’s not forget that the SWBfT caught Kerry in a public lie over spending Xmas Eve in Cambodia, a story he retracted (though of course it wasn’t publicised).
Mark Steyn said it best:
I said a couple of weeks back that John Kerry was too strange to be President, and a week or two earlier that he was too stuck-up to be President. Since I’m on an alliterative roll, let me add that he’s too stupid to be President. What sort of idiot would make the centrepiece of his presidential campaign four months of proud service in a war he’s best known for opposing?
I wouldn’t stand for Parliament on a family values platform because I know someone’s bound to bring up the 123 gay porn movies I had a bit part in back in Amsterdam in the 1970s.
How cocooned from reality do you have to be to think you can transform one of the most divisive periods in American history • in which you were largely
cont:
responsible for much of the divisiveness • into a sappy, happy-clappy, soft-focus patriotic blur without anybody objecting? Most Vietnam veterans of my acquaintance loathe John Kerry, and, if he wasn’t aware of that, he’s too out of it to be President.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/08/24/do2402.xml
Misanthrope
The Kerry campaign had to concede several key accusations made by the Swiftees. For instance his Christmas in Cambodia nonsense, and some of the details of the medals. Most damagingly, he refused to release his full service records. This left the taste of “Fraud”. You may wish to call the Swiftees “discredited”. Far more voters believed them. They holed the Kerry campaign below the waterline. And his recent remarks on his Middle East trip show him still to be a nasty piece of work – snake in the grass. Thank God he lost – in spite of the best efforts of the leftie mainstream US media.
Misanthrope
Ths is not the place to discuss these issues. Suffice to say however, the swift boat vets are most certainly not discredited and the words of a few hundred men prevail over those of a proven liar (Christmas in Cambodia, anyone?) Neither Kerry, nor you nor anyone else has been able to substantiate Kerry’s claim of atrocities so drop it till you can.
Let’s stick to BBC matters now.
Sorry chap, I can’t give you the last word on erroneous info. Let’s not forget that Lt. William Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder of 22 of the villagers of My Lai. There were others too.
“Is that reason enough to go to war?”
I suppose you would rather have waited until Saddam had succeeded in his plans and launched another invasion of one of his neighbors – or maybe massacred a few more Kurds?
Funny, Liberals considered Human Rights abuses good enough reason to go into the Former Yugoslavia and Somalia – but not Iraq. Why is that?
Mind you I supported going into Iraq to deprive the Terrorists of one more supporter and safe harbor.
Misanthrope,
My Lai has nothing to do with whether Kerry or the Swiftboat Vets, or Dan Rather lied, and having done a bit of research on My Lai and Lt. Calley, the upshot of the subsequent investigation into My Lai was that such incidents were not systematic, but isolated incidents. If My Lai (and yes, there were similar incidents) was par for the course and part of the way the US fought that war, there would have been more statistics about innocent civilians being massacred willie-nillie. (In fact, I would probably wager that more junior officers were deliberately killed by US soldiers than innocent civilians.)
Regards,
James
“Sorry chap, I can’t give you the last word on erroneous info. Let’s not forget that Lt. William Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder of 22 of the villagers of My Lai. There were others too.”
Name some, please! All we ever hear is Calley and My Lai. But Kerry did not merely say atrocities had occured – as sadly they always do in war – but that they were *routine* and *approved*.
He said that *all* – not some – American soldiers committed atrocities and they they were encouraged to do so by their superiors. This was not true and he must have known it was not true, yet he said it anyway.
What he has never done is give examples; places, dates and names of these who committed these ‘atrocities’ because he can’t.
While I cannot condone what Calley did, in some ways it is understandable because of the fog of war. There is no reason to get others in trouble and pay more of a price than they already did by going to the front line, which is much more than the U.S. President or Vice President ever did. They had more important matters to attend to.
Misanthrope
You’re an idiot.
” While I cannot condone what Calley did…”
I should hope not!
“… in some ways it is understandable because of the fog of war.”
Thankfully the courts didn’t see it that way and sentenced Calley to life in prison for murder.
In the end, Calley served only days in Fort Leavenworth, before being transferred back to Fort Benning, where he was placed under house arrest. His sentence was repeatedly reduced. Finally, he was pardoned by President Nixon. He was paroled in November, 1974.
It is this fixation with the Vietnam war that lost the Dems the election – and that blinded Mapes and Rather.
To judge by Misanthrope, that fixation is still there. Discuss Rathergate, and they talk about Mai Lai. Get badly beaten for being too out-of-touch leftie – and they start looking at Howard Dean for Dem Chairman.
Fine. Eight or twelve more years for the Repubs.
Pete _ London – kindly desist from contentless name-calling – we want to keep debate around here civilised.
If, as you contend, someone else is an idiot, please leave it to that person to show how idiotic or otherwise they are through their own words.
Thank you.
Andrew – apologies, yellow card noted (arms outstretched, hands up, “who, me guv?”)
Misanthrope – your comments are idiotic.
“While I cannot condone what Calley did, in some ways it is understandable because of the fog of war. There is no reason to get others in trouble and pay more of a price than they already did by going to the front line,”
Make up your mind, Mis, do ‘atrocities’ matter or don’t they? First you say Kerry was justified in defaming his ‘comrades in arms’ by throwing out unfounded accusations now you seem to be saying that such acts aren’t important and those who committed them should be let off.
Misanthrope,
I hate to pile on, but I feel the need to help you find the truth.
Nixon was not behind the Watergate break in. He was involved in the cover up. That was his sin.
Kerry and O’Neil (SwiftBoatVets) go back a long way. They debated the war on several talk shows in the 70’s and Kerry was a liar even then. He claimed that he had been released from service because of his opposition to the war. Indeed that was not the reason. He requested release a year early to run for Congress. He initially ran as a decorated veteran and lost. It was after that loss that he changed sides on the war.
I have his resignation request on my drive with the few records he did release. If you can’t find them online I will be glad to share them with you. My email posted here will work.
(Continued)
His Honorable Discharge came after a review by a board of officers. I believe it was after Jimmy Carter’s anmesty. We don’t know for sure because he won’t release his records.
He went to Paris and met with the enemy. He says he “met with both sides” and he did…the North Vietnamese representatives and the Viet Cong representatives. That’s what he calls both sides.
There is still a huge question-mark over the manner of Kerry’s discharge, as he has refused to release all the papers. The suspicion remained that his original discharge was non-honorable, but this was amended by a Sec of the Navy under a later Dem administration at the behest of Sen Ted Kennedy.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck…..
Some 85% of S journalists are libs :
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/679xorjg.asp
and a good timeline on Rathergate and CBS still lying through its teeth :
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/146gicrb.asp
StinKerr, I believe that Nixon approved the break in, maybe not every last detail, and was done in by the cover up.
As far as Kerry is concerned, I am sorry he didn’t win, but at least he went to Vietnam and fought.
Misanthrope
The election was over in November. Kerry lost. Grow up and accept it.
The problem with the Democrats is they fail to understand this social dynamic:
Upper Classes = Economically Conservative, Socially Liberal
Working Classes = Economically Liberal, Socially Conservative
The Democrats, who are supposed to be the party of the working man, seem to be more concerned with gay rights than the poor.
Alas, the Dems have been hijacked by the Bi-Coastal elites.
Barach Obama or (and this is looking way forward) Jessica Lynch could win as Dem candidates.