Greg Ransom
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"WHITEWASH" -- that's the general consensus among bloggers on the report:
Lorie Byrd --
I have skimmed through the report and found the “political agenda” section particularly amusing. Evidently the panel found certain actions that could support a charge of political motivation, but could not conclude that political motivation drove the September 8 segment. Read that entire section and then try to resist the urge to say, “Duh. Have you never watched 60 Minutes before? Did you not just see the entire election year’s worth of unpaid Kerry-Edwards advertising there?”[UPDATE: Lorie has more on the whitewash here.]
Hugh Hewitt --
By far the most important issue for the panel to investigate was the attempted manipulation of "prestige" media to influence a presidential election. Now CBS has a report that says "mistakes were made" but not because its employees were attempting to bring down a president. Had the Panel exonerated Rather and Mapes, et al., at least the Panel would not have dogged the central question. But of course, no one would have believed such an obviously absurd conclusion. So the Panel provided CBS the next best thing -- a plausible cover for its political hackery. Unless and until MSM owns up to its deep seeded agenda journalism, it will never reform. This was the opportunity to help CBS and through CBS all of legacy media recognize the partisan pit into which it has fallen .. It was a pass/fail test and the Panel failed.Charles Johnson --
The report explicitly denies that political bias was a factor in the pattern of lying and covering up that followed the initial 60 Minutes II segment, but it's quite obvious this is another obfuscation.Patterico --
CBS had all sorts of information contrary to its story line, and didn't report it. This is a common failing in Big Media, and I'd like to see it given more prominence in this report. The report makes a number of technical recommendations .. [t]hese recommendations may be helpful, but they don't get to the root of the problem. The report's primary recommendation should have been: Report the truth, whether it supports your story line or not.Betsy Newmark --
How lame is this explanation of the Rathergate story? ... They had a "zealous belief in the truth of ths segment" but that didn't mean that there was a political agenda. Yeah, sure. They totally threw their ethics out the window ..Captain Ed --
most [of my commentors] see the report as a whitewash. I agree in part with this analysis, mostly on the question of motivation. The report gives way too much credence to the notion that the only motivating factor involved in Mapes' and CBS' decision to run a story without ever checking its central "evidence" was competitive pressure .. [On the otherhand, in the report] we have CBS producers lying, management AWOL, and the entire enterprise embarassing itself. These aren't minor points, and admitting them doesn't make this a whitewash .. The Thornburgh-Boccardi panel has done some good work here, but they punted on the political-bias issue.UPDATE: Howard Kurtz discovers the blogosphere storyline:
If there is one line in the 224-page report on CBS News that has set critics aflame, it is that there is no "basis" for concluding that Dan Rather and his colleagues had a "political bias" in pursuing their badly botched story about President Bush's National Guard service. What, they say? No evidence?Oddly, as Hugh Hewitt notes, Kurtz neglects the bloggers on all this, although he did quote two or three in an earlier column."In any fair-minded assessment of how CBS performed and why they so badly butchered their own standards, that has to be part of the explanation," said former New York Times reporter Steve Roberts, now a professor at George Washington University. "It's not just that they wanted to be first, they wanted to be first with a story that was critical of the president."
UPDATE II: Charles Johnson is calling the report a greywash because, "it’s more insidious than an outright whitewash."
And don't miss this photoshop.
Posted by Greg Ransom
