A moiety of the blogosphere is up in arms over the failure of CBS’s internal report on the Dan Rather scandal to blame political bias for the network’s readiness to pass off obvious forgeries as genuine documents. It is, indeed, hard not to boggle when the investigators conclude that there is no “basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias”. In noteworthy contrast, as Power Line observes, they casually assumed that criticism of CBS was informed by right-wing prejudice.
Almost every report commissioned by an institution in trouble has some implicit ne plus ultra line. In this instance, that was evidently the question of whether CBS is an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Messrs. Thornburgh and Boccardi knew, I suspect, that the price of getting their report released to the public in full, rather (no pun intended) than being presented in selected excerpts, was a declaration that the phony 60 Minutes II segment involved only bad judgement by underlings. Like an accounting firm caught in an auditing blunder, CBS’s management hopes to fire the engagement partner and selected staff, while declaring that the incident says nothing about the overall quality of its procedures.
Hmm, that doesn’t always work, does it? Or so my colleagues who used to work at Arthur Andersen inform me.
But let’s take the report at its word. If CBS’s failure to subject fictitious documents to so much as minimal scrutiny sprang purely from competitive pressures, doesn’t that suggest that the network’s news operation is fundamentally incompetent and untrustworthy? Only a relatively small fraction of the news has a strong partisan angle; “myopic zeal” to get a story out before one’s competitors can infect anything – not just accounts of a politician’s past but also stories about tsunamis and lawsuits and corporate transactions and baseball teams.
If the staff at CBS News thinks in a politically skewed fashion, that is a problem; if it is incapable of thinking at all, one wonders why the public should bother paying attention to whatever it “reports” on any topic. Just as I place more credence in the New York Times, for all of its one-sidedness, than in politically disinterested supermarket tabloids, I shall in the future consider CBS as the place to go for impartially reported nonsense. Apparently that is how Mr. Moonves wants me to think of his organization, and I am happy to comply.
Addendum: I see that Rathergate.com made a related point earlier this evening:
The Memogate report concluded that former Producer Mary Mapes misled her co-workers, misled her sources, and misled supervisors.
So if there is no political bias at CBS, like Dick Thornburgh and Lou Boccardi conclude, why should we conclude that this news story was the first that Mapes fudged?
Investigations into bad journalism at The New York Times (Jayson Blair) and USA Today (Jack Kelley) examined all of the stories written by said authors and uncovered a litany of errors and falsehoods.
CBS’ substantial credibility issue is not over yet. It needs to pull together a team of reporters to pick apart her other stories, contact her sources and determine what other falsehoods she has foisted on us.
For those who are interested, the Spot Formerly Known As Kerry has reprinted Miss Mapes’ apologia. It looks like she aims to become a heroine of the Loony Left à la Cynthia McKinney. Any bets on how long before she starts blaming Zionist neo-cons for her plight?
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