bamaslammer: "If he was a 'radical' right guy as you suppose, he would have attempted to: A. completely get rid of Social Security Uh, what do you think would happen if he allowed people to open "personal savings account" instead of contributing to Medicare? Suddenly depriving the fund of a trillion dollars would effectively bankrupt it. B. get a law passed to take care of Roe v. Wade There is no law that can get rid of Roe v. Wade, because it is a Supreme Court decision. This involves a separation of powers, a concept Bush has only a slight grasp of, but even he knows that much. He can't fix this with legislation, but as soon as he gets a solid majority in the Supreme Court, he can have it overturned. Odds are the next term will see two justices step down, and the moderate Bush has said his ideal justice is ... Clarence Thomas! There's a voice of moderation for you! basso: ABC and NBC are "definitely not moderate, rightest, or anything else"? That doesn't leave anything for them to be! I don't watch NBC all that much, but every time I watch ABC, I think, "yes SIR, Mr. Eisner, SIR!" What's that newsmagazine they have on every other night? Dateline? I mean, come on! BTW great Bloom County. Rather is frequently a scumbag ... I remember the time he walked out on a newscast during a contract dispute. However, maligning Koppel or Brokaw for something they say in public is not fair. They are allowed to have lives off the air. You have to judge them by their on air demeanor, and that is professional and moderate. Rather may or may not be moderate, but his professionalism is as lost as a tick on a cactus (to invent a Ratherism).
halfbreed: "As a journalism student researching media bias, I can tell you that most of the media outlets (ABC and NBC included) lean to the left. [...] when asked how they vote, journalists said 3-to-1 that they vote democrat" I think I know the report you're referring to and it's flawed. (Hint: those polled > respondents.) Do give us an update, though, when you've graduated and started your real education.
ABC has been quite leftist under Peter the Canadian, and the same for NBC with Brokaw. Of course, those guys do not set the institutional thinking - they merely reflect it. Of the outlets I mentioned, the WaPo is the best, even with Dana Milbank. And Howard Kurtz is about the best that can he hoped for when it comes to liberal media critics. He at least has a scintilla of fairness.
gwayneco: "ABC has been quite leftist under Peter the Canadian, and the same for NBC with Brokaw. [...] And Howard Kurtz is about the best that can he hoped for when it comes to liberal media critics. He at least has a scintilla of fairness." So if you're from the left, you think the media is conservative, and if you're from the right, you think they're liberal. Wow, that must make them ..... Parting thought from rabid righty William Kristol: "I admit it. The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." (The New Yorker, 1995)
I wonder where the questionable memos are from. It has been discovered that were faxed from a Kinkos in Texas. Remember when a bug was found in Karl Rove's office and it was blamed on the opposing political campaign, only later to find out that Rove planted the bug himself? I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's been done before, so there is a possibilty.
Stop the conspiracy theories. Props to the Chron for tracking down the source: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2799919
interesting numbers from Rasmussen on what voters think about Rathergate. -- 27% Believe CBS Memos Authentic; 38% Disagree Survey of 1,000 Likely Voters September 14, 2004 CBS Memos: Authentic 27% Forgeries 38% Rather: Unbiased 38% Trying to Help Kerry 38% September 14, 2004--Twenty-seven percent (27%) of voters believe that the CBS Memos concerning President Bush's National Guard service are authentic. However a Rasmussen Reports survey also found that 38% believe the memos are forgeries. Among voters who are following the story very closely, 56% believe the memos are forgeries and 27% believe they are authentic. Overall, 38% of voters say they are following the story "very" closely and 34% say they are following it "somewhat" closely. Only 16% of voters think questions about President Bush's National Guard service are "very" important. That view is held by 27% of Democrats, 13% of unaffiliated voters, and 6% of Republicans. Forty-two percent (42%) of voters have a favorable opinion of Dan Rather, the anchor who reported the story and continues to defend the memos. Thirty-three percent (33%) have an unfavorable opinion of him. Thirty-eight percent (38%) of voters believe Rather presents the news in an unbiased manner. An identical 38% say that Rather is using his broadcasts to try and help elect John Kerry. All of the data has a strong partisan edge to it. Among Kerry voters, 46% believe the memos are authentic while 16% say they are forgeries. As for Bush voters, 61% say they are forgeries while 10% say they are authentic. This data suggests changing perceptions of the traditional media outlets. An earlier Rasmussen Reports survey found that viewers now select their news sources along partisan lines. A 2003 survey by Rasmussen Reports showed that traditional media outlets no longer have the presumption of reliability. In that survey, conducted following the Jayson Blair scandal, only 46% considered the New York Times to be a reliable news source.
looks like CBS is finally starting to address this. but will they name their source? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/p...partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print&position= -- CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say By JIM RUTENBERG After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night. The officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from, and people at the network said it was now possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air. But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night. The report relied in large part on four memorandums purported to be from the personal file of Mr. Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos, dated from the early 1970's, said that Colonel Killian was under pressure to "sugar coat'' the record of the young Lieutenant Bush and that the officer had disobeyed a direct order to take a physical. Mr. Rather and others at the network are said to still believe that the sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings but that the documents' authenticity was now in grave doubt. The developments last night marked a dramatic turn for CBS News, which for a week stood steadfastly by its Sept. 8 report as various document experts asserted that the typeface of the memos could have been produced only by a modern-day word processor, not Vietnam War-era typewriters. The seemingly unflappable confidence of Mr. Rather and top news division officials in the documents allayed fears within the network and created doubt among some in the news media at large that those specialists were correct. CBS News officials had said they had reason to be certain that the documents indeed had come from the personal file of Colonel Killian. Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said last week, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents.'' But officials decided yesterday that they would most likely have to declare that they had been misled about the records' origin after Mr. Rather and a top network executive, Betsy West, met in Texas with a man who was said to have helped the news division obtain the memos, a former Guard officer named Bill Burkett. Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and several people close to the reporting process said his answers to Mr. Rather's questions led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that the memos had come from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material. It was unclear last night if Mr. Burkett had told Mr. Rather that he had been misled about the documents' provenance or that he had been the one who did the misleading. In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Burkett declined to answer any questions about the documents. Yesterday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail. In an interview last night she declined to name the producer who told her this but said the producer was in a position to know. CBS News officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the night before the initial "60 Minutes'' report that it would face questions from documents experts. In the coming days CBS News officials plan to focus on how the network moved ahead with the report when there were warning signs that the memorandums were not genuine. Ms. Will is one of two documents experts consulted by the network who said they raised doubts about the material before the segment was broadcast. Another expert, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he had vouched only for Colonel Killian's signatures on the records and not the authenticity of the records themselves. Mr. Matley said he could not rule out that the signatures had been cut and pasted from official records pertaining to Colonel Killian. In examining where the network had gone wrong, officials at CBS News turning their attention to Ms. Mapes, one of their most respected producers, who was riding particularly high this year after breaking news about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for the network. In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes'' Wednesday edition, said that he did not initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but that he did not see any reason to doubt them. He said he believed Ms. Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt upon the essential thrust of the report. "The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day,'' he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility.'' He added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis.'' Ms. Mapes has not responded to requests for comment. Mr. Howard also said in the interview that the White House did not dispute the veracity of the documents when it was presented to them on the morning of the report. That reaction, he said, was "the icing on the cake'' of the other reporting the network was conducting on the documents. White House officials have said they saw no reason to challenge documents being presented by a credible news organization. Several people familiar with the situation said they were girding for a particularly tough week for Mr. Rather and the news division should the network announce its new doubts. One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, "Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?''
Thanks, basso. My confidence in †he memos has gone from 80% to 50% to 10% to about a millionth of a percent. CBS was foolish to use them. They had a fairly good story without them and Bush's story about his guard service was already completely discredited. If they had just used Barnes in the piece it would have been damaging, but now Bush can say questions about his service are based on forged documents and be just as convincing as Meg Ryan.
Very nice response. Civility in the D&D? This is refreshing. That type of response is usually only found in the Fantasy Forum.
it's official: http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/20/cbs.documents/index.html -- CBS says it can't prove Bush documents' authenticity In statement, Rather calls report an error made 'in good faith' NEW YORK (CNN) -- CBS News said Monday it cannot vouch for the authenticity of documents it broadcast on "60 Minutes" casting doubt on the National Guard service of President Bush during the Vietnam era. In a written statement, CBS said Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, has admitted that he deliberately misled a CBS News producer, "giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source." In the statement, CBS News President Andrew Heyward said his network believed the documents were real but after further reporting cannot establish that they are. "CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret." Heyward said that an independent review of how the reports were prepared and broadcast will be commissioned by CBS News and the findings of that review will be made public. Rather: 'We have been misled' In a separate statement, CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who was the principal reporter on the story, said, "Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. "That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where -- if I knew then what I know now -- I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question. "But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism. "Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully." Questions about documents In its reporting, CBS News said it had obtained documents written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died in 1984. Those documents appear to show that Bush had failed a direct order to take a physical, something that was required for him to do to remain in good standing. Further, CBS said the documents showed Killian believed he was being pressured to "sugarcoat" the performance of Bush, the son of a then-Texas congressman. Almost immediately, the authenticity of the documents was questioned. CBS said it had had experts look at the documents, but other experts said the documents may not have been real and may have been typed on equipment not available in the early 1970s. Killian's former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, 86, said she never typed the documents, which would have been her responsibility. She told The Dallas Morning News, "These are not real. They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him.'' But Knox told the newspaper that the documents did echo Killian's views on Bush. She said he retained memos for a personal "cover his back'' file he kept in a locked drawer of his desk, but she was not sure what happened to them when he died. The CBS report also included an interview with former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes in which he said he helped get Bush a slot in the Texas National Guard. In that interview, Barnes described his awarding of a slot to Bush as "preferential treatment." CBS did not retract that part of its report.
