Wednesday,
January 19 2005
MORE EXCUSES FOR MAPES AND CBS: This is getting
ridiculous. On the heels of yesterday's
silliness where two leaders of a "media watchdog"
group tried to minimize the CBS scandal and compare it to
the reporting of Judith Miller of the New York Times, a
reader sends through this
column from Robert Jamieson in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Journalistic
sins tend to play out differently depending on who is
involved. Consider Fox News, the media outlet that Republicans
love. Last fall, FoxNews.com posted an item by reporter
Carl Cameron purporting to contain quotations from then-Democratic
presidential hopeful Kerry -- quotes such as, "Didn't
my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate."
"The
item was based on a reporter's partial script that had
been written in jest and should not have been posted or
broadcast," Fox apologized. "We regret the error,
which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not
malice."
And
that was that for behavior that is arguably more
troubling than the honest mistake Mapes made through competitive
haste. (Emphasis added)
Now
we're supposed to believe that Carl Cameron jotting down
a few silly phrases that were accidentally posted to the
Fox News web site is "arguably more troubling"
than Mary Mapes orchestrating a 60 Minutes hit
job built around forged documents to try and influence the
outcome of a presidential election?
Watching
left-leaning commentators fall all over themselves to try
to minimize and excuse the transgressions of Mapes and CBS
shows that the bias in the industry is deeper and more rigid
than we can possibly imagine.
Consider
that Jamieson also sees fit in his column to ponder this:
if
the broadcast had involved unsustainable allegations about
John Kerry, would the repercussions have been as severe?
I suspect not.
To
ask this question you have to believe that Mary Mapes and
the folks at 60 Minutes would actually run a piece
critical of John Kerry in the first place (regardless of
whether the allegations were "sustainable" or
not). That is something no objective person believes - and
for good reason.
Mapes
and the rest of the MSM was put to that test last year with
the Swift Boat Veterans story. They failed. Not a single
member of the mainstream media felt compelled to investigate
the allegations of the Swiftees, many of which were at least
if not more "sustainable" than the ones CBS used
in the Bush National Guard story.
Instead,
when Unfit For Command was published in early August
the MSM took one look at the source and the allegations
and deemed them too partisan and too politically motivated
to be given any serious coverage. Too bad Mapes and the
folks at CBS didn't evaluate the Bush National Guard story
using the same criteria. - T. Bevan 10:15 am Link
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