Overall, The New York Times did not pull many punches in its first post mortem on CBS’ internal investigation of the Rather Affair. I don’t think Dan Rather will enjoy reading their coverage, nor will CBS news division president Anthony Heyward who is, by implication, compared unfavorably to former Times Managing Editor Howell Raines (who had the grace to withdraw when those under him were discredited).
Hindrocket pulls the most interesting, or at least poignant, quote:
[A] production staff member said the staff at CBS did not feel powerful enough to bring about change. “We have no juice,” the staff member said. “We’re a dying business, and this didn’t help us. Some people feel like CBS News could be out of business in five years.”
I agree. In fact, unlike Hindrocket, I think this is a highly likely outcome. CBS News is a vestige of the old days when the networks ruled the television airwaves. The major networks themselves are outdated constructs which mix entertainment and news. Who is interested in that anymore when both are becoming increasingly “on demand” commodities whether via TiVo, all-news networks or shortly and inevitably the Web? The traditional model of the network is on its way out. That, notwithstanding all the pea-brained bias of Ms. Mapes and the pompous buffoonery of Dan Rather, may ultimately be the real story here.
In this case of professional suicide, CBS not only bought the gun and the bullets; it reloaded the gun when the first couple of bullets hadn’t managed to kill it.
Mary Mapes also produced the segment on Jan 11, 2004 in which it was reported that a book by Ron Suskind and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill contained a map that showed how the Bush Administration was going to divide up the oil in Iraq. Only three days later on NPR, Suskind and O’Neill said “60 Minutes” had misrepresented that map.
If CBS had taken a better look at Mapes handling of this segment, three CBS executives might still have their jobs and Dan Rather might have been remembered a bit more fondly.
[A] production staff member said the staff at CBS did not feel powerful enough to bring about change. “Shut up and smudge those xeroxes, you peons! I am a titan of the medium!”
Rather is perhaps the most reviled man in CBS News. Even his “peers” realize that they are stuck with him, not working alongside him. Look for the tell-all books to start coming out… and look for Viacom sub Simon & Schuster to give Rather a seven-figure deal for the story of his epic struggle…
Hmmm, am I the only person to notice that this story makes almost no attempt to explain the background–the faked memos, the BS about “unimpeachable” sources–and focuses instead on how upset everybody is at CBS at what happened?
Roger, the networks haven’t been entertainment and news operations for ages. They have been an entertainment (with embedded propaganda) and propaganda disguised as news operation for a long time.
The future of news gathering and distribution is certainly an interesting area of speculation.
I think we should outsource it to India.
In fact, CBS and the NYTimes and the Wash Post, and Associated Press and etc have bustled about for the past two years trying to hound Bush out of office, and trying to discredit American efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They almost succeeded in the first; and are close to it in the second.
This is really quite serious, folks; For the future of the USA and (incidentally) for the future of Western Civilization.
Without talk radio and the Web, Kerry would be president, planning meetings with Europe and the UN, making policies that ensure that the USA is “popular” with one and all; hanging Australia out to dry; and withdrawing US troops from Iraq as quickly as possible. The terrorists would be on the march and taking an airplane trip would (for me) be out of the question.
So, I am GLAD that CBS is beaten, and the whole bunch of the overpaid minions in the MSM should find other jobs. Soon.
We still need to look at the technical side of this. It is ENTIRELY provable that the documents are forgeries!
See here:
http://wethefree.blogspot.com/2005/01/c-bs-worse-than-whitewash-hogwash.html
C-BS hasn’t called the Doctor because they don’t want to know they are sick.
The value of the blogosphere is that the “ill” get the “housecalls” they need even if they try to lock the door and strap on their tinfoil hats…
ìHmmm, am I the only person to notice that this story makes almost no attempt to explain the background–the faked memos, the BS about “unimpeachable” sources–and focuses instead on how upset everybody is at CBS at what happened?î
There is no doubt but that CBSí attorneys thoroughly vetted the report. Never forget that CBS is granted a license by the FCC. This news organization is making use of public airwaves! The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that top CBS officials minimally allowed their anti-Bush sentiments to overrule their judgment. Do such actions jeopardize CBSí exclusive license?
ìSo, I am GLAD that CBS is beaten, and the whole bunch of the overpaid minions in the MSM should find other jobs.î
Describing some of these individuals as overpaid is an understatement. Mary Mapes is rumored to have been earning at least $150,000 annually. This individual is barely one step above a blithering idiot. Viacom, the parent company has been losing huge sums of money for years on CBSí news division. This is a publicly traded company—and the stockowners obviously wonít allow this to continue indefinitely. The FCC demands a certain amount of so-called ìpublic goodî broadcasting. Nonetheless, I suspect that CBS can still respond adequately to these regulations while still limiting its financial loses.
I’m glad heads rolled but I think more needs to be done. And I think the one with whom the buck stopped needs to suffer consequences as well. And, someone has got to make sure Mary Mapes never ever works again in an influential position. Seems she’s issued a statement where she defends herself. Here’s part of her statement, as copied from Power Line’s entry:
Aaaaoouuuugggghhhh!!!! Fair and honest, my ass.
Pride cometh before fall.
Or something like that.
I once heard a report about mary Mapes’s Dad who had said she was so partisan there was no talking to her anymore.
Meanwhile, seems there’s problems with the French and German economy and Europe is finally taking notice – http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050110/ap_on_bi_ge/europe_economy. Meanwhile, the US economy continues full steam ahead.
Roger,
I think that rumours of the death of network news are not unlike rumours regarding the death of Mark Twain.
The fate of CBS News is absolutely not pre-ordained. It will depend entirely on their strategy going forward. If they continue with their left-wing me-to strategy by which they are pale imitations of NBC and ABC, they are toast. If CBS sets a strategy to become the Fox News of broadcast, they will become the dominant broadcast news outlet.
There is a niche – half the country – that is not being served by broadcast news. CBS should grovel at the feet of Brit Hume with a blank check to replace Rather. Then let Hume clean house.
Out of crisis comes opportunity. This is a HUGE opportunity for CBS News. Whether they are smart enough to exploit this opportunity remains to be seen.
I think Mapes is actually playing it pretty smart now, auditioning for a job with George Soros or Air America or “GoreTV” or some other organization where being an acknowledged political hack producer is considered an unalloyed virtue.
Is anybody able to comment on my FCC speculations? Could CBS lose its broadcasting license? A national network isnít suppose to be partisan. Yet some top level CBS employees obviously tried to bring down a president. Has CBS jeopardized its very right to continued existence? What would the New York Times be saying if Republican leaning individuals tried to destroy a Democrat president? Might it not argue that CBS should be forced to sell itself to another media company?
DT, I’ve often wondered myself about whether Viacom would unload CBS. Viacom is of course a profit-driven corporate conglomerate whose portfolio of businesses includes mature cash cows, underperforming dogs, and high-growth stars. Typically, smart senior management will continually re-assess which businesses are dogs, which are stars, and then use the cash flow generated by the cash cows to feed the stars.
At the same time, smart management will starve the doggy businesses of cash and resources, seeking to turn them into profitable, smaller companies that can either pull their weight or attract a reasonable takeover offer from a strategic buyer who can extract more value from them and would therefore assign a higher financial valuation than the owner would.
What is CBS News within the Viacom portfolio? Clearly it’s neither a high-growth star nor a cash cow. Network news has an enormously high cost base, and its revenue base shrinks every year. Unless you expand into high-growth overseas markets (Al-CBS, anyone?), I’d guess it’s pretty much impossible to make it profitable. Why then would any competent management team wishing to increase shareholder value retain such a dog?
Obviously, it’s all about prestige. It’s like Lee Iacocca buying up Lamborghini and Maserati with Chrysler shareholders’ money. CBS is to Viacom as an art film studio is to a maker of teeniebopper tiz-n-zitz movies. Sumner Redstone can convince himself and his board and shareholders that they’re not in the business of selling mind-numbing shit to teenagers– which they are, via MTV– but that they’re upholding a national icon, nay, a national treasure, an essential service to American democracy, hence, to the world! Edward R Murrow, Bill Paley, Cronkite, 60 Minutes: speakers of truth to power!
Which is of course utterly ridiculous to anyone with a good brain, a modem and access to a web browser.
The only question I have is how much longer the east coast elite will keep up the fiction that network news is even relevant to democracy, let alone an indispensable pillar of democracy.
When that realization hits, I would think the appropriate buyer for the CBS News asset would be an entertainment organization. Perhaps a porn distributor seeking to become respectable and mainstream?
Or maybe Apple Computer? They could take all the CBS footage– used and unused– and digitize it and make it available for ripping and re-cutting and distribution on iPod-like devices. What a blast that would be!
Actually, if you axed the high seven-figure salaried anchor-blowhards and useless execs like Heyward, you might well be able to make the venture profitable after all. Keep the overseas bureaus; add more. Upload content from blogger-stringers and make your own content available for free after it’s been aired. Drive advertising and subscription revenues through wireless providers and vendors of handheld devices.
On a side note, this incredible (say what?) piece by Howard Kurz and Dana Milbank at the Post, an “analysis” of Rathergate deserves fisking by someone who can write (registration required):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64190-2005Jan10.html
You just have to love the quote by Joe Lockhart that K&M manage to slip in there. It pretty much says it all.
Out of all the news about the ìcleanupî or ìwhitewashî in the CBS (whatever term strikes individual fancy) the most welcome is that Lovely Mary is temporarily out of job. But I have to say that I donít see much reason for rejoicing beyond that. Dan Rather, as predicted, will recover with full honors and I seriously doubt that he values any negative future verdict of his conduct above his current millions. Besides, he only served the Greater Truth, and all is fair in love and war. And War it is.
Three other individuals are also out, but not the Director of the News Division ñ if only his subordinates read his memos, all this could have been avoided, no?
A report is written, summarized in the press as: “Mistakes were made in our journalistic zeal to get the scoop but we did it with the Best Intentions! And look how honest we are! We are getting rid of 4 of our best! Just so the ungrateful and dimwitted Public can be served.”
All this strikingly resembles the Jayson Blair affair at the NYT. Scandal is uncovered. Scandal is denied. When denial is not possible any longer there is internal ìcleanupî i.e. few individuals who committed most visible offences and who do not have enough protection are fired, and everything is again right as rain.
I doubt the imminent demise of the Anchorman, and I doubt that any significant reforms will take place to make the MSM more accountable in the near future, even given the new context of the blogospheric environment. There are too many vested interests involved in keeping all the species of the ancient journalistic fauna on a life support. However, I take heart from Pinch Sulzberger desire to piss his family fortune just such endeavor. (BTW, WP is similarly protected by Warren Buffetís investment).
Of course, We The Public can help to end all this by simple act of canceling subscriptions and turning off the TV. But I doubt that even that will be enough. I suspect that the likes of George Soros would step in to provide necessary (let it be staggeringly huge!) funds to prevent many MSM outfits from passing away to the great beyond. If someone like him gives them a new makeup and a transfusion of funds they still could, Zombie-like, spring back to life! ñ even if they are resurrected as Air America or Gore TV.
Didn’t more womens’ heads roll than mens’?
One small point that apparently needs to be made repeatedly in innumerable venues: there is no need whatever to prove the documents are forgeries.
The burden of proof is on those proferring the documents to establish their authenticity (by objective criteria – none of this “unimpeachable source” argument from authority rubbish). That burden of proof has not been carried.
Until and unless those producing the documents can prove that they are authentic, the documents must (consistent with my nom de Net) be considered inauthentic.
From this perspective – which I’d have thought would be journalism 101 – the CBS report is clearly a whitewash. How could even a cub reporter not grasp the dubiousness of these highly convenient documents?
Answer: the documents were but a vehicle to achieve a predetermined goal.
The Times would do well to turn Mr. Walker’s discerning eye to its own biased coverage of the Bush White House.
I feel cheated by this “investigation.” We still don’t know who forged the papers. Was it Mary? Dan? Joe? Perhaps the same guy who did Lehman for Karry’s medal?
I thought it was more or less widely assumed now that Burkett forged the documents himself? It’s the simplest explanation, anyhow.
I don’t think Thornburgh and Boccardi can be faulted too much for a failure to conclusively determine the source of the documents, though. Burkett wasn’t cooperating with the investigation at all, and since it was just a private investigation, they didn’t have any power to compel his cooperation. Without Burkett’s cooperation, there’s not a hell of a lot more leads they could have pursued. They could run around Texas a bit looking for Lucy Ricardo, but unless there are other leads I don’t know about, that’s about it.
Plus, Burkett’s non-cooperation itself tends to suggest he was the source of the documents. Not to mention that the clumsiness of the forgeries works against the “Burkett was set up” theory.
CBS hires a supposedly objective panel which takes 110 days to conclude they are not sure the memos are fakes and they cannot accuse CBS of political bias. I appreciate your long terms views, but we still have immediate issues here.
110 days. Maybe faked memos? Maybe CBS bias? We knew that after 110 MINUTES.
This was not a whitewash, this was a pig circus.
I think the most striking thing about the report is the incredibly slipshod way that CBS is managed. Their “vetting” of the story amounted to them saying, “Ms Mapes, do you triple-dog swear that this is all correct and well founded?” She said “yes” and they ran with it. They call that “vetting”?
I call it something else.
Thibaud ó I pass a parked Chrysler-Maserati daily on my trip tp work. That is one ugly car.
Richard,
Never saw one, myself. Do you have a link?
As to my earlier surmise:
The only question I have is how much longer the east coast elite will keep up the fiction that network news is even relevant to democracy, let alone an indispensable pillar of democracy –
It seems that this realization might not be far off. Here’s Howard Fineman of Newsweek, er, I mean, of Microsoft-GE-NBC-KatharineGrahamWorld:
A political party is dying before our eyes ó and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the “mainstream media,” which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.
…the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it’s pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things. The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS’s star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon’s fate as the first president to resign.
The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born….
In this situation, the last thing the AMMP needed [in 2004] was to aim wildly at the president ó and not only miss, but be seen as having a political motivation in attacking in the first place. Were Dan Rather and Mary Mapes after the truth or victory when they broadcast their egregiously sloppy story about Bush’s National Guard Service? The moment it made air it began to fall apart, and eventually was shredded by factions within the AMMP itself, conservative national outlets and by the new opposition party that is emerging: The Blogger Nation. It’s hard to know now who, if anyone, in the “media” has any credibility.