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« Beating Expectations | Main | Political Winds » September 24, 2004Memogate: A Blunder of Colossal HubrisNashville City Paper has a good editorial on memogate, calling the performance of Dan Rather and his CBS News colleagues "a colossal blunder." The most damning allegation is that the provider of the false documents, a man of questionable repute, only agreed to give them to CBS if the network put him in touch with the Kerry campaign.Good editorial, but the paper is wrong in calling it a blunder. CBS knew what it was doing. Dan Rather knew the documents were suspect before he went on the air with the story - we know that from the testimony of experts that CBS hired, and then ignored when they cautioned CBS against using the documents. Dan Rather knew the story, sans the memos, was simply the words of two known anti-Bush political partisans, one of whom wrote an anti-Bush book and the other who has raised huge sums for the Kerry campaign and is a Kerry advisor. And Dan Rather knew or should have known that CBS only got the documents from Bill Burkett because it helped Burkett get in touch with Kerry campaign bigwig Joe Lockhart. And Dan Rather knew or should have known that Burkett was a rabid Bush-hater whose credibility was known to be extremely deficient and who is known to have made up lies about President Bush's military service record. A colossal blunder? Yes, but not an honest blunder, a mistake, but a colossal blunder of hubris, of thinking that the goal of defeating George W. Bush justified the use of fraudulent forged documents and the airing of a partisan hit-piece that broke all the rules of honest, balanced, fair journalism. Posted in Journalism & Media
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RatherGate!!! Below is a NewsMax.com article that says CBS steered the forged document source to the Kerry Campaign!!! ( http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/9/20/225421.shtml ) With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff For the story behind the story... Monday, Sept. 20, 2004 10:52 p.m. EDT CBS Steered Forged Doc Source to Kerry Campaign In what may be the most damaging revelation yet in the Rathergate document scandal, CBS News is admitting that it steered the source of forged military records damaging to President Bush to the Kerry campaign. In exchange for the meeting with Kerry communications director Joe Lockhart, that source - former National Guard Commander Bill Burkett - agreed to give CBS copies of the Bush records. USA Today is set to report in Tuesday editions: "Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a female producer talked to him about the "60 Minutes" program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett." "At Burkett's request, we gave his [telephone] number to the campaign," Betsy West, senior CBS News vice president, confessed to USA Today. Late Monday, CBS said it was investigating the role of "60 Minutes" star producer Mary Mapes in setting up the contact between Burkett and Lockhart. "The network's effort to place Burkett in contact with a top Democratic official raises ethical questions about CBS's handling of material potentially damaging to the Republican president in the midst of an election," the paper said. Aly Colón, a news ethicist at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said the collusion between CBS and the Kerry campaign to damage President Bush "poses a real danger to the potential credibility of a news organization." The White House reacted sharply to the Lockhart development, with Communications Director Dan Bartlett complaining, "The fact that CBS News would coordinate with the most senior levels of Senator Kerry's campaign to attack the president is a stunning and deeply troubling revelation." Posted by: Don Hagen at September 24, 2004 03:01 PMPost a comment
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