Archive » Rathergate

At the bottom of a column published at 7:31 am this morning, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz downplays the Schiavo memo controversy:
Powerline[,] which played a role in exposing CBS’s National Guard memos, is wondering about the Republican strategy memo that, oddly enough, fails to list an author:
“Confirming what we reported, ABC News has [...]

John Hinderaker of Power Line got this quote from an ABC News source (via Josh Claybourn) on the fishy Schiavo memo first disclosed by ABC News reporter Linda Douglass:
the memo discussed a republican bill and was distributed to repulbican senators. That’s what we reported. we are obviously not going to divulge our multiple sources. [...]

Garance Franke-Ruta has a ridiculous article in the American Prospect arguing a la Dan Rather that the bloggers who brought down Eason Jordan and exposed RatherGate are partisan Republican activists disguising themselves as independent citizen bloggers.
Don’t waste your time reading the whole thing. This one paragraph is all you need to read to understand where [...]

Dan Rather is signing off on Wednesday. Party planning is underway across the country. Washington Times columnist John McCaslin reports:
Atlanta-based author, pundit and media consultant Phil Kent, former president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, tells this column that he’s hosting a party on the evening of March 9 in the Buckhead section of the city [...]

Get your barf bucket ready before you read this USA Today tribute to Dan Rather:
The recent “Memogate” scandal has made Rather a “piata (sic), with people lining up to whack him with a big stick,” says 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft. “Good journalists always make powerful enemies, and Dan’s are more zealous than most. People [...]

Bill Burkett, the former Texas national guardsman who fed those infamous bogus memos to CBS, now appears ready to sue the network, reports Ratherbiased.com.

Little Green Footballs has been all over the story of Democrat Maurice Hinchey, the N.Y. congressman who claims Karl Rove planted the CBS Rathergate memos.
Confederate Yankee, a constituent in Hinchey’s district, can’t get anyone from the congressman’s office to respond to his inquiry about the remarks. The local press has buried the controversy. E-mail [...]

You’ve seen the NY Observer piece on CBS’s meltdown.
Blog powerhouse Power Line first highlighted the Thornburgh report’s silence on the role top execs played in the memo fiasco here. Maybe Josh Howard and his lawyer were reading! (While we’re talking Power Line, see also Paul Mirengoff’s piece in the Weekly Standard: Inferring the Obvious.)
La Shawn [...]

You all know how I feel about the Bush administration’s media “pay-to-pander” scandal. (Go here and here and here for a refresher.) In two words: absolutely disgusted. When I first blogged about the Armstrong Williams payoff, I wrote this:
Any other pundits who accepted [...]

Keying off the Armstrong Williams/Dept. of Ed. mess, LaShawn Barber examines good propaganda, bad propaganda, and the law. Read her.
Previous coverage:
Rathergate vs. Paidpunditgate
Why no one paid me to sell “No Child Left Behind”
Rodney Paige, Armstrong Williams, and the Pay to Pander Scandal

Bloggers are taking note that the Thornburgh/Boccardi report on CBS does not seem to take a position on the authenticity of the Killian documents. On p. 14 on the report, the authors note:
The Panel has not been able to conclude with absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries.
This shouldn’t be interpreted as [...]

From the CBS report, this is damning:
pp. 26-28.
The Contact With the Kerry Campaign
Another troubling aspect of the September 8 Segment emerged in the public disclosure on September 21 that Mapes had been in contact with Joe Lockhart, a senior staff member of the Kerry presidential campaign, in connection with the production of the Segment. Mapes [...]

Done accurately and fairly, investigative reporting serves a critical role in a free society. Done inaccurately, it can cause great harm.
– The investigative report on CBS News from Dick Thornburgh and Lou Boccardi, p. 16

MSNBC: Four let go over Memogate. The producer and three executives asked to step down…but not Andrew Heyward. “10 serious defects” identified.
CBS News’ coverage…

(CBS) Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been ousted for their role in preparing and reporting a disputed story about President Bush’s National Guard service.
The action was prompted by the [...]

Gearing up for the rumored release of the CBS Rathergate report today or early next week, here are some quick, handy links:
Buckhead: “I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.”

Power Line: The sixty first minute
Little Green Footballs: The document experiments (I II)
INDC Journal: Are [...]

From Ana Marie Cox’s interview with Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe:

What did you think of the bloggers’ role in the Dan Rather affair?
Answer: I think they did a disservice to the debate because they made the debate about the documents and not about the president of the United States. There was another half to that story that [...]

By now, you’ve all read about the MSM’s attempted October Surprise, NBC’s revelation undermining the missing cache story (via Kerry Spot, Drudge, and others), and the extensive blog coverage on the left and right (good sample here, here, and here).
See also this incisive Wall Street Journal editorial, published today (but apparently written before the [...]

My friend Mike Fumento shares his insights on Rathergate here and points out that CBS has relied on mentally unstable sources before.

An alert reader sends me a link to a rather interesting ebay auction. Here’s the auction description:
“Spend 60 minutes behind the scenes at 60 MINUTES. Meet the 60 MINUTES team including some of the on air correspondents and the producers who put the broadcast together every week. See where the stories are created and debated, [...]

From a member of the The Dan Rather Fan Club:
Everything they said about Bush is true; they just haven’t found the evidence yet.
- Dale Channer, 34, florist, the Bronx, quoted in the New York Daily News

All you need to know from today’s lengthy Washington Post tick-tock article reconstructing (deconstructing?) Rathergate:
*Rather also dismissed the notion that CBS was negligent: “I’m confident we worked longer, dug deeper and worked harder than almost anybody in American journalism does.”
*[60 Minutes" executive Josh] Howard said he believed some of the outsiders’ questions about superscript and [...]

Why have we not heard a peep about Rathergate from Mary Mapes?
Mapes, a senior producer (one of CBS’s “most highly regarded,” according to Associated Press) for Dan Rather, worked on the disastrous 60 Minutes II segment and obtained the dubious Killian docs, which were reportedly faxed from a Texas Kinko’s. Newsweek reported that Mapes met [...]

5:45pm. All eyes on CBS. The sound of the stopwatch on 60 Minutes has taken on a whole new context. Tick tick tick tick…
Jeff Quinton is liveblogging here.
Send Allah some money while you’re waiting. And spare a few minutes on this good read from Bryan Preston, in response to Orin Kerr’s pooh-poohing of Rathergate. More [...]

It’s a real e-mail address. No joke. Send ‘em your thoughts!
(Hat tip: West Coast Conservative.)

Credit: Jeff Miller at The Curt Jester
Inspired by Rathergate, Jeff Miller has created Microsoft Forger, with handy features for future CBS sources, including:
Output machine selection - Select from a variety of emulators for everything from manual typewriters, IBM Selectrics, early model word processors such as Wang and many others.
Font selection - Once you have selected [...]

Contrast the latest coverage of Rathergate by the New York Times, which can’t bring itself to even acknowledge the path-breaking role that blogs played in blowing the whistle on CBS in its 1,208-word article, with the coverage by the New York Sun, which reconstructs how four independent blogs–Powerline, Little Green Footballs, INDC Journal, and Allahpundit–led [...]

I received an e-mail from BoycottCBS.com calling on the Federal Election Commission to hold CBS/Viacom in violation of federal election law. Their argument is that the media exception to McCain-Feingold does not apply in cases of fraud and does not cover “electioneering coordinated with a political campaign.”
BoycottCBS.com’s heart is in the right place, but they [...]

Thanks to the great work of FReepers and bloggers (especially Powerline), it is just a matter of time before CBS News admits it relied on forged documents in its “scoop” about President Bush’s National Guard service.
Once CBS news executives acknowledge their error, they will have a tough decision to make: whether to name the people [...]