thedrifter
10-04-05, 09:10 AM
Dan Rather and the Truth
Written by Gregory Borse
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Dan Rather and his senior producer, Mary Mapes, implicated in the now infamous attempt by CBS’ 60 Minutes II to perpetuate a fraud upon the American public regarding President Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War through the use of faked memos which purported to “prove” that he shirked his duty and benefited from his connections, continue to reveal the lengths to which they will go to protect their reputations and to establish that the story they told—although unsupported by the facts—was, nonetheless “accurate.”
From Matthew Sheffield at Newsbusters.com there’s this:
[Dan] Rather also expressed suspicion about bloggers' role in publicizing CBS’s mistakes in the whole Memogate affair.
"There are some strange, and to me, still mysterious things, certainly unexplained things that happened about how it got attacked and why, even before the program was over," Rather said, adding that his network was derelict in not "knowing enough of how quickly bloggers could strike."
“The anchor appeared to have softened his attitudes toward some (unnamed) web authors but remained suspicious about ‘those bloggers who were partisan politically affiliated and/or had an ideological axe to grind with us’ in the exposition of the document scandal” (go here).
From Powerlineblog.com there’s this regarding the forthcoming book by Mary Mapes on the CBS 60 Minutes II forged documents fiasco. Following the infamous broadcast,
“Mapes returns with her ‘senior document analyst’ Marcel Matley in tow. She celebrates the broadcast of her expose of the never-before-told misconduct of the incumbent president. She’s riding the wave of yet another professional triumph. Then a pall sets in:
‘All that changed about 11:00 a.m., when I first started hearing rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far right Web sites were saying that the documents had been forged.
‘I was incredulous. That couldn’t be possible. Even on the morning the story aired, when we showed the president’s people the memos, the White House hadn’t attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.
‘Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
‘All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators--or whatever they were--were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement’” (go here).
There was something of an echo-chamber, no doubt. That happens every moment on the Internet—especially in forums and especially in those forums dedicated to discussions between like-minded and like-spirited souls strangely passionate enough to discuss ad-nauseam the objects of their own fascination. It’s as apt a description of the Daily Kos as it is of FreeRepublic—and its reality is one that establishment media has been too slow to appreciate.
Nearly a month before the 60 Minutes II fiasco, Fred Turner described the dangers of misunderstanding the new media in an entry at TechCentralStation on 8/19/2004:
The "mainstream press" may be in the process of squandering a precious resource that its leaders no longer have the institutional memory to recognize as the source of its legitimacy and its living. In the last few years -- essentially since 9/11 plunged us into a new world, a new agenda, that the press did not understand -- the major organs of civilized journalism, once trusted by the billion most effective people on the planet, have given away their credibility upon a trifle.
Everybody now recognizes that such voices as CNN, the New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, the major TV networks, the New Yorker, the Guardian, etcetera, are . . . the express and all-but-explicit advocates of a very special point of view, one with specific political goals. Those goals are certainly different from those of al-Jazeera or the socialist press, but they are in their own way as coherent, exclusive, and unquestioned.
. . . The journalistic Boomers themselves, who had often been trained by scholars who believed that there might be truth about a state of affairs that could be closely approached if not fully attained, usually knew when they were bending the truth and spinning for political advantage. Their leftist principles taught them that objectivity was desirable in the abstract and might again become feasible and desirable once the inequities of society were resolved. In any case, they felt, one should not lightly fritter away the legacy of credibility built up since the Enlightenment by the great authoritative institutions of civilization -- science, historiography, the serious newspapers, the great museums, the courts, and so on. But their younger followers and employees, postmodernist in belief-system, educated by ideologically relativist and politically correct junior professors, and increasingly deprived of the basics in logic, ethics, and inductive reasoning by their specialist education, were no longer capable of making any distinction between what was true and what was conducive to their social ideals.
Thus the scandals associated with such violators of journalistic trust as Howell Raines and Jayson Blair of the New York Times, Andrew Gilligan of the BBC, and Eason Jordan of CNN (who confessed that CNN had been going easy on Saddam Hussein for many years, with the implication that CNN had helped prepare a public attitude of sympathy for his regime and anger at the UN sanctions) are but the tip of the iceberg. Studies have shown that the huge majority of journalists and professors are liberal Democrats; no cause for alarm in itself, but troubling when the brakes of traditional critical analysis have been disabled, as they were by the deconstructionist ideology of the schools. And the general reader is beginning to realize that there is indeed a systematic bias in the traditional news media.
continued...
Written by Gregory Borse
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Dan Rather and his senior producer, Mary Mapes, implicated in the now infamous attempt by CBS’ 60 Minutes II to perpetuate a fraud upon the American public regarding President Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War through the use of faked memos which purported to “prove” that he shirked his duty and benefited from his connections, continue to reveal the lengths to which they will go to protect their reputations and to establish that the story they told—although unsupported by the facts—was, nonetheless “accurate.”
From Matthew Sheffield at Newsbusters.com there’s this:
[Dan] Rather also expressed suspicion about bloggers' role in publicizing CBS’s mistakes in the whole Memogate affair.
"There are some strange, and to me, still mysterious things, certainly unexplained things that happened about how it got attacked and why, even before the program was over," Rather said, adding that his network was derelict in not "knowing enough of how quickly bloggers could strike."
“The anchor appeared to have softened his attitudes toward some (unnamed) web authors but remained suspicious about ‘those bloggers who were partisan politically affiliated and/or had an ideological axe to grind with us’ in the exposition of the document scandal” (go here).
From Powerlineblog.com there’s this regarding the forthcoming book by Mary Mapes on the CBS 60 Minutes II forged documents fiasco. Following the infamous broadcast,
“Mapes returns with her ‘senior document analyst’ Marcel Matley in tow. She celebrates the broadcast of her expose of the never-before-told misconduct of the incumbent president. She’s riding the wave of yet another professional triumph. Then a pall sets in:
‘All that changed about 11:00 a.m., when I first started hearing rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far right Web sites were saying that the documents had been forged.
‘I was incredulous. That couldn’t be possible. Even on the morning the story aired, when we showed the president’s people the memos, the White House hadn’t attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.
‘Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
‘All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators--or whatever they were--were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement’” (go here).
There was something of an echo-chamber, no doubt. That happens every moment on the Internet—especially in forums and especially in those forums dedicated to discussions between like-minded and like-spirited souls strangely passionate enough to discuss ad-nauseam the objects of their own fascination. It’s as apt a description of the Daily Kos as it is of FreeRepublic—and its reality is one that establishment media has been too slow to appreciate.
Nearly a month before the 60 Minutes II fiasco, Fred Turner described the dangers of misunderstanding the new media in an entry at TechCentralStation on 8/19/2004:
The "mainstream press" may be in the process of squandering a precious resource that its leaders no longer have the institutional memory to recognize as the source of its legitimacy and its living. In the last few years -- essentially since 9/11 plunged us into a new world, a new agenda, that the press did not understand -- the major organs of civilized journalism, once trusted by the billion most effective people on the planet, have given away their credibility upon a trifle.
Everybody now recognizes that such voices as CNN, the New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, the major TV networks, the New Yorker, the Guardian, etcetera, are . . . the express and all-but-explicit advocates of a very special point of view, one with specific political goals. Those goals are certainly different from those of al-Jazeera or the socialist press, but they are in their own way as coherent, exclusive, and unquestioned.
. . . The journalistic Boomers themselves, who had often been trained by scholars who believed that there might be truth about a state of affairs that could be closely approached if not fully attained, usually knew when they were bending the truth and spinning for political advantage. Their leftist principles taught them that objectivity was desirable in the abstract and might again become feasible and desirable once the inequities of society were resolved. In any case, they felt, one should not lightly fritter away the legacy of credibility built up since the Enlightenment by the great authoritative institutions of civilization -- science, historiography, the serious newspapers, the great museums, the courts, and so on. But their younger followers and employees, postmodernist in belief-system, educated by ideologically relativist and politically correct junior professors, and increasingly deprived of the basics in logic, ethics, and inductive reasoning by their specialist education, were no longer capable of making any distinction between what was true and what was conducive to their social ideals.
Thus the scandals associated with such violators of journalistic trust as Howell Raines and Jayson Blair of the New York Times, Andrew Gilligan of the BBC, and Eason Jordan of CNN (who confessed that CNN had been going easy on Saddam Hussein for many years, with the implication that CNN had helped prepare a public attitude of sympathy for his regime and anger at the UN sanctions) are but the tip of the iceberg. Studies have shown that the huge majority of journalists and professors are liberal Democrats; no cause for alarm in itself, but troubling when the brakes of traditional critical analysis have been disabled, as they were by the deconstructionist ideology of the schools. And the general reader is beginning to realize that there is indeed a systematic bias in the traditional news media.
continued...