CBS arrogance and collateral damage
Posted by Ryan to category: Media
I've just now had time to read Ernest Miller's deep, thorough recap of CBS' responses to critics in the memo controversy, which Victor linked to a couple posts ago. I think I could use a stiff drink.
Because of real-life demands, I've only been able to follow the memo story in fits and starts since its first couple days. I knew that CBS had been stonewalling, ignoring specific critiques that it had no answers for, but I had no idea how sad things had become. After seeing the sum of the past several days in Miller's timeline, I'm stunned. CBS has been arrogant, diversionary, misleading, bullheaded, dismissive, shameless, narcissistic, secretive and unethical. Good Lord, we're supposed to illuminate that kind of behavior, not illustrate it.
At the beginning of the whole controversy, I was willing to give CBS at least some benefit of the doubt. I even found something of a silver lining to the whole debacle, even if it was only in my own mind. But at that point, CBS still had a chance to inject new information into the debate, or to at least open up the process of their story. They could have explained in detail how they authenticated the documents, as evidence that they did their journalism right. In the absence of such evidence, they could have admitted they got duped, then apologized, then announced a Blair-scale investigation into their professional practices. They've done none of these things.
And the grace period is over.
Other news outlets have jumped in admirably with investigations into the forgery story, but it's time to see some harsher words for the failure of journalism that CBS has displayed in its wake. (Andy Rooney should have used a bigger curmudgeon stick, but maybe this Chicago Tribune piece is a start.) Would the media be eating one of its own? Too bad. CBS has screwed all of us over -- both with the way it ran the story and with the way it's handled the backlash. The network's behavior has confirmed every single nasty thing that everybody believes about the media, and it's not like we've got a nice fat reserve of goodwill to squander right now.
This is where CBS jumps on the grenade. Only fair, considering they pulled the pin and fumbled it in the first place.
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