<font size=4>The real story in Rather ruckus remains untold
<font size=3>John Kass
Chicago Trib
September 22, 2004
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With CBS News and Dan Rather apologizing for a get-Bush story based on phony documents, some journalists wonder if Rathergate has rekindled the national debate over liberal bias in newsrooms.
Is this really something Americans are debating? Don't we already know the answer?
There are more important questions, including this one:
Did some at CBS collude with Democrat John Kerry's campaign to bloody President Bush by using phony documents and a wacky source to question his Vietnam-era service in the National Guard?
Not that the debate about media bias is unimportant. It's so important that we've been having it for the last 30 years or so. We refuse to stop.
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Consider what would have happened if, instead of Rather and CBS, the offenders were Brit Hume and Fox News?
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Rather received 12 days' grace before he delivered an apology. His problem was not blamed on his politics, but on a lapse of professional judgment, going with one source while ignoring those who questioned the veracity of the documents.
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Yet if Hume were the offender, would his professional judgment be questioned? Or would his politics be condemned?
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Hume works for Fox, identified by journalists as the conservative network, in part because the network often questions the assumptions of liberal orthodoxy. Hume and Fox would have been instantly trashed as agents of the political right. His skin would have been peeled by the op-ed winds. And as for the debate on whether newsrooms are Democratic by population, I'm puzzled. What debate?
Over the years, I've developed a radical hypothesis: that most reporters covering government and politics are on the Democratic side of the spectrum. That's not to say they don't do their jobs or that they're intellectually dishonest, any more than conservatives are. Humans have politics. Reporters, though this may surprise some politicians, are human.
Yet Fox News has ratings because it offers an alternative. Viewers and readers know what's not said. They know what's not written. The market identifies a need and addresses it.
What aggravates many folks is not whether reporters from the Washington press corps will vote for Kerry. What aggravates consumers is that the assumptions on which liberal policies are based aren't challenged enough on network news and in the papers.
The notion that the federal government, for example, can't <font color=blue>"afford"<font color=black> a tax cut is accepted as perfectly reasonable, as if the government is a human, some guy down the block with his own bills and headaches. On same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control, racial preferences in hiring and in the awarding of government contracts and so on, there is an accepted view. And there is an aberrant view.
The nation is evenly divided on many of these issues, but in many big-city newsrooms, that's simply not the case. Does this come as a surprise?
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Again, there's a question more important than hand-wringing. What was the relationship between CBS and the Kerry campaign over this story?
The so-called National Guard documents heralded by Rather have now been determined by forensic experts to be forgeries. CBS and Rather admit that they can't vouch for their authenticity, even while insisting the gist is accurate--that the president used his political influence to dodge responsibilities in the National Guard some 30 years ago.
CBS helped the stridently anti-Bush source--former Texas Army National Guard official Bill Burkett--speak with Joe Lockhart before CBS ran its story on "60 Minutes II."
Lockhart is a top Kerry adviser. He was the spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, who has also given Kerry advice. The ink was barely dry on the phony memos when the Democrats had a TV spot ready on the memos and story.
Lockhart says there was no collusion. He simply talked with Burkett about various matters, but not the memos.
Loud Democratic criticism forced Bush White House counsel Ben Ginsberg to resign after it was reported he had contacts with the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Will Lockhart resign, as did Ginsberg?
According to USA Today, Burkett said he was contacted about the documents by the mysterious Lucy Ramirez. Burkett said he received the documents by hand, via an unidentified third party, at a Houston area livestock show.
Can you hear those dogies lowing? Just watch your step. And don't forget tall boots.
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"I didn't even ask any questions," <font color=purple>Burkett said. <font color=blue>"Should I have? Yes. Maybe I was duped."<font color=purple>
Burkett says he made copies, then burned the originals to protect Ramirez, who may not exist.
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"This is going to sound like some damn sci-fi movie," <font color=purple>he told USA Today.<font color=black>
It sounds like a political potboiler, one I'd rather read than worry about a reporter's politics.<font size=3>
jskass@tribune.com
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