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The Tsunami and a Whitewash
I don't have much time to write, as it's getting late, and I have to get to
bed. Tomorrow, I have a code cutoff for the project I'm leading, so the past
several weeks have been incredibly busy. I've been working a minimum of 9 or 10
hours a day. Because my commute is so long (dratted Seattle traffic!) I'm away from home at least 11 or 12 hours. Add on top of that the usual time
spent on getting ready in the morning and evening meal time, and I just don't have
much time left for blogging. So, for all three of you that visit, my apologies.
This is my first post of 2005, and we're nearing the middle of January already!
I wish I had more time to write, because there have been some interesting
things happening lately.
The Tsunami
The death toll from the tsunami continues to rise. If you haven't donated to
relief efforts, there are a number of excellent agencies that you can donate to.
Two that I can personally recommend, since I know folks that work for them, are
World Concern and World Vision. Both are based near my home, and are honest,
capable organizations. Both have had workers in the areas affected by the
tsunami for many years, know the situation on the ground, and are adept at
getting help to those most in need. My wife's cousin was the area director for
Southeast Asia for World Concern, and lived in Bangladesh and Thailand for many
years. These folks know the area, know the people, and know how best to help. If
you'd like to support them, visit their web sites:
www.worldconcern.org and
www.worldvision.org.
The Whitewash
So, CBS has finally released its
report [PDF document; you need
Acrobat Reader
to view it] on the Rathergate affair. Four employees have been fired,
including Mary Mapes, the producer of the 60 Minutes report that broke the
"story" based on the fraudulent Texas Air National Guard memos.
Last September, I wrote
this
about Mary Mapes and the 60 Minutes report:
What does that say about CBS, their methods, and their biases? For more
than five years, Mary Mapes has been trying to prove, without success, that
President Bush was AWOL or in some other way didn't fulfill his
responsibilities while he was in the National Guard. After over five
years of effort this is the best that they could come up with. That
isn't reporting, it's stalking. After five years, they have nothing
to show, other than the statements of known Democratic party partisans and
operatives and some forged documents. Utterly pathetic.
The CBS report basically confirms my opinion. In a section titled
"Information that Might Suggest a Political Agenda" the very first subsection is
"Rather and Mapes’ Long Pursuit of the TexANG Story." In that section, it says
this (the whole section is reprinted here in its entirety):
As described earlier, Rather and Mapes first pursued a story about
President Bush’s TexANG service in 1999 and 2000. Although a number of
stories were publicly reported during that time by other news organizations,
Rather and Mapes did not produce any stories at that time. They then set
aside reporting on President Bush’s TexANG service until 2004, at which time
a number of other news organizations renewed their pursuit of the story. The
Panel does not view the length of Rather and Mapes’ pursuit of this story as
persuasive evidence of a political agenda. Mapes did not believe that she
was able to gather enough meaningful information for a story in 1999 and
2000. Mapes and Rather pursued the story again in 2004, but only after a
significant number of stories had appeared in the national media on the
subject beginning in or about February 2004. Rather and Mapes were able to
put together the September 8 Segment because they were the first to obtain
documents that they believed were genuine and significant, and because Ben
Barnes agreed to do his first nationally televised interview on 60 Minutes
Wednesday. The Panel cannot be sure why Lieutenant Colonel Burkett provided
the documents first to Mapes, particularly since he declined to talk to the
Panel. However, Mapes informed the Panel that he told her that her refusal
to disclose confidential information in another story that appeared on 60
Minutes Wednesday about murders in Jasper, Texas, even when threatened with
jail, was a major factor in his decision to provide her with the documents.
This seems to be a reasonable conclusion since Lieutenant Colonel Burkett
made it clear to Mapes and Mike Smith that he did not want his identity
disclosed as the source of the documents.
So, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes tried to find out about the president's
National Guard Service over five years ago, dropped it when they couldn't find
anything worth reporting, then dug it up again, basing the 60 Minutes report on
documents that any competent, unbiased person would recognize as suspicious.
They did only the most rudimentary vetting of the documents, basically just to be
able to say that "experts" had authenticated them:
Efforts at authentication failed miserably. Hired document examiners
whose views went against the rush to air were cast aside. The four original
document examiners became two and ultimately one, who opined only on one
signature in one document. Nevertheless, the Segment contained an
unsupported declaration of authenticity.
Why did Rather and Mapes believe in these documents? They were clearly and
obviously fake. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that they wanted the documents to be authentic
so much that they were willing to overlook
overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In fact, they may have wanted them to be
authentic so much that they could not do otherwise but to overlook the
contrary evidence. Why did they want them to be
authentic? Well, to be fair, there are at least a couple of possibilities: 1)
ambition; 2) political bias.
The authors of the report favor the ambition motivation:
How did it happen? The Panel believes it happened primarily because of a
rush to air that overwhelmed the proper application of the CBS News
Standards and the people who are supposed to prevent the problems described
in this Report. Those responsible for the Segment believed firmly that it
was true (and some still do). In particular, the producer, Mary Mapes, had
fervent faith in what she was reporting and the correspondent, Dan Rather,
had great confidence in Mapes’ work. Everyone involved wanted the Segment to
be right. But in journalism, no less than in other fields, wanting is not
enough.
In my opinion, the ambition motivation doesn't wash. If the story was
motivated primarily by ambition, it seems to me CBS would have devoted more
effort to making sure the story was right, rather than smearing the document
examiners that disagreed with them, stonewalling, lying, and ignoring evidence
offered by other sources (like the various bloggers) that showed that the
documents were forged. Indeed, the penultimate sentence in the previous quote,
"Everyone involved wanted the Segment to be right" is laughable, given the huge
amount of evidence in the report showing that the last thing CBS wanted
to do was be sure the story was right.
No, Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, and the other CBS people that researched and
vetted the story didn't want the story to be right; they wanted it to be
true. Which means only one conclusion can be reached: CBS News, and
specifically Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, were and are politically biased against
Republicans in general and President Bush in particular. Their bias influences,
and perhaps even drives, their reporting. Of course, to those of us on the
conservative side of the political aisle, this is not a surprise.
In my review of the CBS report, it looks like the authors were trying to ride
the fence. On one side, the authors of the report had to condemn what was
clearly a bogus, poorly researched story, produced with little or no management
oversight, by a producer with a long history of trying to pin the AWOL label on
the President, based on fraudulent documents obtained from people with a known
and strong hatred of President Bush. On the other side, it seemed that the
authors wanted to avoid saying what we all know: that CBS wanted desperately for
John Kerry to win the election and was willing to broadcast outright lies to
further that end.
Thus, the report is kind of a weird mixture of quotes like this:
Behind all of the Aftermath’s missteps lay the fierce conviction of some
at CBS News that the story was true and there was a refusal by some to
consider that it might be false. That unwillingness led CBS News to ignore
mounting evidence – detailed throughout this Report – that there were
problems with the documents and the adequacy of the original reporting.
And this:
The senior producers and management, Murphy, Howard and West, as well as
the other vetters, all told the Panel that they were comfortable in
broadcasting the September 8 Segment because they believed at the time that
the Killian documents and their content had been authenticated. They
recognized the political sensitivity of the story and took steps to make it
more balanced. The Panel finds no evidence that any of these individuals
were motivated by political considerations.
The first quote specifically notes bias ("there was a refusal by some to
consider that it might be false") and incompetence ("that unwillingness led CBS
News to ignore mounting evidence'), while the second discounts political
bias as a possibility. Did the authors ever consider why "some" refused
to believe that it was false? Specifically, did the authors ever consider why
Mary Mapes herself refused to believe that the story could be false?
Mapes stridently believed in both the authenticity of the documents and
their content, and, indeed, told the Panel that she still does.
So, even despite the overwhelming mountain of evidence that shows -
proves! - that the documents were forgeries, Mary Mapes still thinks that
they're authentic. Yet, we're supposed to believe she has no political bias.
Right - and pigs fly, too.
I've never met Mary Mapes, and I don't particularly like hearing that someone
has lost his or her job, but it seems to me that CBS News may be a much better
news organization without her. Hopefully, both CBS News and she will have
learned a valuable lesson from this, but you know, I'm not going to count on it.
Old habits are hard to break.
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