Olbermann: CBS a Victim, FNC the Villain for Running Swift Ads --1/11/2005

1. Olbermann: CBS a Victim, FNC the Villain for Running Swift Ads
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann insisted on Monday night that the case of Armstrong Williams taking money from the Bush administration combined with the CBS panel finding no political bias behind CBS's hit job on President Bush, discredits the idea of any liberal media bias. Olbermann also portrayed CBS as a victim compared to the perpetrators at FNC since CBS News "played within the journalistic rules" while "you're not going to see Fox News appointing an independent investigation into its own journalistic ethics or lack thereof" for running the Swift Boat ads which were "full of distortions."

2. Fret CBS Staffers Fired, Yet No One Fired from Bush Team for War
MSNBC's Chris Matthews and New York Times reporter Bill Carter, who fretted that it would be a "real loss" if Dan Rather were to leave television news, managed to turn the release of the panel's report on CBS News, which prompted CBS to oust four staffers, into an opportunity to complain about how no one was fired from the Bush administration for using false pretenses to lead the nation into war. Fondly recalling how tough Dan Rather was against President Nixon, Matthews on Monday night complained that "when we found there was no case for the war in terms of weapons of mass destruction, nobody pounded down the door and said don't give us that malarkey. There was no sense of outrage" by journalists. Matthews asked: "How many people have been fired at the White House for failure to get the facts right on weapons of mass destruction and taking us into war under false pretenses?" Carter chimed in: "I think they got Medals of Freedom!" Matthews affirmed, referring to the medals given last month by Bush to Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer: "They got Medals of Freedom!"

3. CBS Stresses Panel Saw No Political Bias, But Admits Others Do
Dan Rather avoided the CBS Evening News on Monday night, leaving the anchoring duties to Bob Schieffer. The newscast led with two stories on the report from the independent panel. In the first, Wyatt Andrews emphasized how the panel ended up "accusing the network not of political bias, but of being in a competitive rush." He added: "The panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries. And despite a controversial phone call Mapes made to the Kerry campaign, the panel found no political agenda." In the second piece, however, Jim Axelrod acknowledged how others see bias, running a soundbite from a blogger who declared that "it's very clear to me that these people were on a mission to try to get President Bush for the purpose of influencing November's election." Leading into a clip from Rush Limbaugh, Axelrod noted: "On talk TV and radio, political bias was item number one."

4. Don Hewitt: Would've "Been More Scrutiny If...About John Kerry"
NBC Nightly News highlighted how the CBS panel found no evidence of liberal political bias behind the hit job on President Bush and the newscast featured an "In Their Own Words" segment from Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute who declared: "I don't think bias was a factor in what went wrong." But on MSNBC's Hardball, Chris Matthews quoted Don Hewitt, the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes until May of last year, as conceding during a Monday meeting at CBS: "Does anybody really think there wouldn't have been more scrutiny if this had been about John Kerry?"

5. CyberAlert Long Ago Noted Same CBS Dissembling That's in Report
Four months ago, within hours of CBS's first defense of its story, CyberAlert undermined some of the very CBS claims discredited in the "Report of the Independent Review Panel, Dick Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, on the September 8, 2004 60 Minutes Wednesday Segment 'For the Record' Concerning President Bush's Texas Air National Guard Service," which was released on Monday. For example, Dan Rather's dissembling on the superscripted "th."

Olbermann: CBS a Victim, FNC the Villain
for Running Swift Ads

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann insisted on Monday night that the case of Armstrong Williams taking money from the Bush administration combined with the CBS panel finding no political bias behind CBS's hit job on President Bush, discredits the idea of any liberal media bias. Olbermann also portrayed CBS as a victim compared to the perpetrators at FNC since CBS News "played within the journalistic rules" while "you're not going to see Fox News appointing an independent investigation into its own journalistic ethics or lack thereof" for running the Swift Boat ads which were "full of distortions."

At the top of the January 10 Countdown, Olbermann trumpeted how "a vivisection co-chaired by a former Republican Attorney General of the United States found no political motivation behind the CBS decision to run the story and could not even conclusively decide whether or not the memos at the heart of the controversy were real or fake."

A few minutes later, Olbermann asserted, as taken down by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth: "There is, of course, a larger context in which the CBS flap fits politics and reporting. The presumption that if there is a story, there's a bias. The Thornburgh-Boccardi report suggested otherwise as the President and CEO of CBS was today quick to note."
Les Moonves, CBS Chairman [clip #1]: "Forget about political bent. I don't think it had anything to do with it. I think it had to do with not doing their jobs."
Moonves [clip #2]: "It is very important that people consider CBS News a fair organization that reports on stories fairly."

Olbermann then argued that the case for any liberal bias has been discredited: "For people who assume there is a liberal bias in the media, two odd things have happened Friday. First, the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams turns out to have been taking government payments to promote administration policy. Now, the former Attorney General under President Reagan and the first President Bush says the Killian memos CBS story was not politically motivated."

Turning to his guest, former New York Times reporter Alex Jones who appeared via satellite from Boston, Olbermann wondered: "How do these two stories -- Armstrong Williams and the Thornburgh findings about CBS -- fit into that matrix that insists that the media is tilted largely to the left?"

Olbermann next painted CBS as a victim and FNC as the real bad guys: "To some degree, do you think CBS got caught in this here because they had otherwise played within the journalistic rules. I mean, if you look at the Swift Boat ads last summer -- full of distortions, some demonstrably untrue content in there -- yet they were run as gospel by many news outlets even though they were by definition designed to influence the election. But you're not going to see Fox News appointing an independent investigation into its own journalistic ethics or lack thereof for those ads."
Jones basically agreed: "Well, I think that was a terrible situation, and I think, again, this is not a matter of partisan politics. This is a matter of getting things into the information news stream that looked like news when they aren't at all. This was ostensibly reporting about an ad. But the ad is a dishonest ad. And the fact that it was put on again and again and again communicated to people who were watching it on television that it was true because television wouldn't put it on if it weren't true, right? Well, that wasn't the case at all. And the people who put it on repeatedly were simply justifying themselves by saying it was about the news of the ad. That's not good enough."
Olbermann: "Right, it was true there was an ad. That was the truth contained therein."

Fret CBS Staffers Fired, Yet No One Fired
from Bush Team for War

MSNBC's Chris Matthews and New York Times reporter Bill Carter, who fretted that it would be a "real loss" if Dan Rather were to leave television news, managed to turn the release of the panel's report on CBS News, which prompted CBS to oust four staffers, into an opportunity to complain about how no one was fired from the Bush administration for using false pretenses to lead the nation into war. Fondly recalling how tough Dan Rather was against President Nixon, Matthews on Monday night complained that "when we found there was no case for the war in terms of weapons of mass destruction, nobody pounded down the door and said don't give us that malarkey. There was no sense of outrage" by journalists. Matthews asked: "How many people have been fired at the White House for failure to get the facts right on weapons of mass destruction and taking us into war under false pretenses?" Carter chimed in: "I think they got Medals of Freedom!" Matthews affirmed, referring to the medals given last month by Bush to Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer: "They got Medals of Freedom!"

The relevant exchange toward the end of a 9pm EST Hardball special on Monday night devoted solely to the report about CBS from the independent panel:

New York Times reporter Bill Carter, on the phone: "You know what is interesting, you noted earlier how aggressive this guy can be. He was really aggressive with those Presidents. And you're right, we don't seem to see reporters like that anymore. If Dan were to go away and not be on TV anymore it would be a real loss."
Chris Matthews: "You know, I wonder, because you know I've been a skeptic as everyone who watches this show knows about the justification for this war with Iraq, and in fact whether it's guide for our country period. And it seems to me no one ever really banged down -- whether it was on Sunday television or weekdays or anytime -- really banged down the door and hit the people hard, and said, 'where's your hard evidence that this guy is a threat to us?' We want hard evidence, not speculation, not conjecture, not history. Hard evidence of today's threat. Nobody really did it. And then when we found there was no case for the war in terms of weapons of mass destruction, nobody pounded down the door and said don't give us that malarkey. There was no sense of outrage, I hate to use a phrase like that, because it's journalism. But nobody seemed to say, 'dammit, where's the truth here. We don't trust you anymore.'"
Carter: "I think the reason for that, is what we're seeing with Rather. I mean there is a chorus out there of critics who go after people who have that opinion now. It's much more powerful than it used to be. I think the one thing Mary Mapes completely underestimated here, was what is what was going to happen with this story she didn't have totally nailed. To me it's like -- I was thinking, you know that expression 'suicide by police,' where you wave -- you don't really have a weapon, but you wave it in front of the police and then you get killed? That's kind of what happened to her here."
Matthews: "How many people have been fired at the White House for failure to get the facts right on weapons of mass destruction and taking us into war under false pretenses?"
Carter: "I think they got Medals of Freedom!"
Matthews: "They got medals of freedom! So while you can also complain about this, you got to wonder."

CBS Stresses Panel Saw No Political Bias,
But Admits Others Do

Dan Rather avoided the CBS Evening News on Monday night, leaving the anchoring duties to Bob Schieffer. The newscast led with two stories on the report from the independent panel. In the first, Wyatt Andrews emphasized how the panel ended up "accusing the network not of political bias, but of being in a competitive rush." He added: "The panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries. And despite a controversial phone call Mapes made to the Kerry campaign, the panel found no political agenda." In the second piece, however, Jim Axelrod acknowledged how others see bias, running a soundbite from a blogger who declared that "it's very clear to me that these people were on a mission to try to get President Bush for the purpose of influencing November's election." Leading into a clip from Rush Limbaugh, Axelrod noted: "On talk TV and radio, political bias was item number one."

(Rather is back in Manhattan from the tsunami. On Tuesday morning, he anchored CBS's coverage of President Bush's nomination of a new Secretary of Homeland Security.)

Bob Schieffer teased the January 10 CBS Evening News: "Tonight, an independent review exposes serious flaws in the production of a 60 Minutes Wednesday report on President Bush. We'll tell you what the review found and the fallout."

Schieffer led the newscast, as corrected against the closed-captioning by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth: "Good evening. I'm Bob Schieffer. Dan will be back tomorrow. Last fall, CBS appointed an independent review panel to investigate how a flawed story about President Bush's National Guard service was allowed to air on the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes. Today, the panel reported its findings, and CBS took disciplinary action against a number of CBS News employees. CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews begins our coverage."

Wyatt Andrews began: "The independent panel slams CBS News and 60 Minutes Wednesday for what it called 'fundamental deficiencies in reporting,' accusing the network not of political bias, but of being in a competitive rush."
Louis Boccardi, Independent Review Panel: "The story wasn't ready, and they put it on the air. The basic journalism was faulty."
Dan Rather: "Tonight, we have new documents and new information."
Andrews, over video from the original story: "On the broadcast last September 8, Dan Rather presented four documents purportedly from the personal file of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, the National Guard commander of then-Lieutenant George W. Bush, documents that said Lieutenant Bush failed Guard standards and benefitted from political pressure to 'sugarcoat' his record. But the independent report picks the story apart, noting that neither Rather nor his highly respected producer, Mary Mapes, ever confirmed the original source of the documents, never truly authenticated the documents, and worse, made a, quote, 'false statement' in the story-"
Rather, in original story: "We consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert-"
Andrews: "-by reporting that one expert called the material authentic when he had not. However, the panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries. And despite a controversial phone call Mapes made to the Kerry campaign, the panel found no political agenda."
Richard Thornburgh, Independent Review Panel: "In terms of rock-solid evidence that there was such, we didn't find it. We didn't find any actual bias."
Andrews: "On the question of blame, the report points mostly to producer Mapes, finding, for example, she never told superiors her source, Bill Burkett, was an ex-Guardsman with an anti-Bush history. The report is less critical of Rather, saying he demanded that the story be verified, but had just returned from the Republican convention and then from Hurricane Frances, and had relied on Mapes."
Les Moonves, CBS Chairman: "I think the main mistake was trusting someone that clearly misled him."
Andrews: "CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves says Rather will not be disciplined in light of his previous decision to leave the anchor chair this March."
Moonves: "We don't feel it's appropriate that anything else should happen."
Andrews: "Mary Mapes, however, was fired. Three senior managers who supervised the broadcast, and who the panel said failed to ask the right questions, were asked to resign. CBS News president Andrew Heyward keeps his job. CBS News standards on the use of documents and the handling of disputed stories are being tightened."
Moonves: "We need to establish a much more forthright system of checks and balances where something like this couldn't happen."
Andrews: "As part of those checks and balances, CBS News also appointed a new senior vice president for standards and special projects, whose job in part will be to track all complaints that a story might violate standards of fairness. Mary Mapes, meanwhile, issued a statement saying she told her superiors everything about her sources, and that she still believes the documents were well corroborated. Dan Rather today had no comment."

Schieffer introduced the second story: "The independent panel noted that other news organizations have recovered from a reporting crisis by acknowledging mistakes and overhauling procedures that allowed them. That, the report said, is what CBS News must now do. Jim Axelrod now with reaction to the report."

Axelrod: "For CBS News, the moment of truth was here. And there was no shortage of interest or reaction."
Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary: "CBS has taken steps to hold people accountable, and we appreciate those steps."
Axelrod: "The White House was gracious but seemed to want more from today's report."
McClellan: "And we also hope that CBS will take steps to prevent something like this from happening again."
Axelrod: "Even John Hinderacker, one of the first conservative bloggers to raise questions about the story, conceded the investigation was thorough."
John Hinderacker, Powerlineblog.com: "The report was a little bit better than I expected."
Axelrod: "But he maintained the report dismissed charges of systemic political bias."
Hinderacker: "It's very clear to me that these people were on a mission to try to get President Bush for the purpose of influencing November's election. And we don't see any recognition of that in anything that's been said by CBS News."
Todd Connor, Fox News Channel: "CBS released a copy of the report on its Web site just after 10:00 this morning."
Axelrod: "On talk TV and radio, political bias was item number one."
Audio of Rush Limbaugh: "They wanted the story to be true. And why? Because they had an axe to grind with George W. Bush."
Axelrod: "Critics from all parts of the political spectrum agree today was the first step down the road of trying to reestablish credibility."
Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post: "It's going to take a while for the network to get over a high-profile blunder."
Axelrod: "How long that road may be is the lingering question tonight. Do you think this report puts the incident behind CBS?"
Andy Rooney, 60 Minutes: "I don't think it does. I don't think it does any further damage, but I don't think it's going to be forgotten for quite a while."
Axelrod: "That's one thing every observer of this episode can agree upon. Jim Axelrod, CBS News, New York."

Don Hewitt: Would've "Been More Scrutiny
If...About John Kerry"

NBC Nightly News highlighted how the CBS panel found no evidence of liberal political bias behind the hit job on President Bush and the newscast featured an "In Their Own Words" segment from Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute who declared: "I don't think bias was a factor in what went wrong." But on MSNBC's Hardball, Chris Matthews quoted Don Hewitt, the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes until May of last year, as conceding during a Monday meeting at CBS: "Does anybody really think there wouldn't have been more scrutiny if this had been about John Kerry?"

On ABC's World News Tonight, Brian Ross brought up a finding I didn't see highlighted elsewhere: "The investigation says, while Rather played a small role in the original report, he played a large role in trying to defend the indefensible, often blaming the right wing."
Richard Thornburgh: "He mischaracterized the source, referred to him as 'unimpeachable,' when it's well-known in the background of this particular source was a lot of bias and a lot of reason to pause."

Lisa Myers stressed on the January 10 NBC Nightly News: "Despite long-time accusations of liberal bias at CBS, the panel, which includes a former Republican Attorney General, found no evidence this story was driven by a political agenda."
Richard Thornburgh, former Attorney General: "We did find, however, an insensitivity to appearances, so most of the sources for this story had a strong anti-President Bush agenda of their own."
Myers: "The panel also said producer Mary Mapes' contact with the Kerry campaign about the story was inappropriate and created an appearance of political bias."

NBC Nightly News followed up with an "In Their Own Words" segment from Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute. He contended: "Many accuse CBS News of bias, of ideological bias and political bias. The situation is probably unique to some degree because of the case history. There has been tension between Dan Rather and the Bush family."
George H.W. Bush, in 1988 confrontation with Dan Rather: "How would you like it if I judge your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?"
Steele: "I don't think bias was a factor in what went wrong. I think it was a failure of skill, a failure of standards, and a failure of journalistic oversight."

CyberAlert Long Ago Noted Same CBS Dissembling That's in Report

Four months ago, within hours of CBS's first defense of its story, CyberAlert undermined some of the very CBS claims discredited in the "Report of the Independent Review Panel, Dick Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, on the September 8, 2004 60 Minutes Wednesday Segment 'For the Record' Concerning President Bush's Texas Air National Guard Service," which was released on Monday. For example, Dan Rather's dissembling on the superscripted "th."

An excerpt from the Saturday, September 11 CyberAlert item, "Rather Stonewalls, Fails to Address Evidence, Derides Critics," about the Friday, September 10 CBS Evening News:

# Dissembled as he distorted the points made by experts about fonts and typography.

Rather asserted, over side-by-side shots of a superscript "th" in a 1968 form not in dispute and one of CBS's memos: "Critics claim typewriters didn't have that ability in the 1970s. But some models did. In fact, other Bush military records already officially released by the White House itself show the same superscript."

Actually, while both examples CBS displayed on screen, of an enlarged "111th," showed a superscripted "th," they were not the same: In the old example, labeled "official record" by CBS, the "th" has an underline or score beneath it and while it is above the bottom of the "111," the top of the "th" is even with the top of the "111." In the superscript in the "new document," one of those CBS attributes to Killian, the "th," matching modern word processor convention, is much higher so half of it is above the top of the "111."

The posted version of this CyberAlert will feature a screen shot of the two examples of "111th" displayed by CBS...

END of Excerpt

For the September 11 CyberAlert article in full with the screen shot, see: www.mediaresearch.org

Now, from page 158 of the Boccardi/Thornburgh report:

On the evening of September 9, Mapes believed that she had an answer to whether the superscript "th" was available on typewriters in 1972-73. She found among the official Bush records a document with a superscript "th." The superscript "th" in the official Bush record, however, did not rise above the adjacent number and was underlined, as can be seen in Attachment A to Appendix 4 to this Report. See also, Appendix 4 at 3.

In contrast, the superscript "th" used in the Killian documents rose well above the adjacent number. See Exhibits 2B, 2E and 2F. Notwithstanding this potentially significant difference, as discussed later in this Report, the September 10 CBS Evening News report pointed to the existence of the superscript "th" in the official Bush records as evidence that the documents used by 60 Minutes Wednesday were authentic. The Panel does not believe that this was sound reporting.

END of Excerpt from CBS panel's report

For the CBSNews.com posting of the panel's report and related materials: www.cbsnews.com

For the 200-plus page report, as a PDF (the only option): cbsnews.com

For the CBS News statement: cbsnews.com

The MRC's stuff on this subject:

-- Dan Rather in Crisis: Rundown of the MRC's Memogate Coverage, with links to CyberAlert articles: www.mediaresearch.org

-- "The Ten Worst Media Distortions of Campaign 2004," with six from CBS News: www.mediaresearch.org

-- Before Memogate, 60 Minutes Pounded Bush All Year, a Media Reality Check which documented the anti-Bush agenda during 2004 by 60 Minutes which avoided any tough coverage of John Kerry: www.mediaresearch.org

-- Brent Baker