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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (22727)	9/10/2004 2:18:31 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 173976

The Hoaxing of CBS Why were they so easily duped? by Richard Starr --- a managing editor at The Weekly Standard. 09/10/2004 weeklystandard.com Starts off: "A NUMBER OF EXPERTS have now weighed in on the inauthenticity of the documents CBS breathlessly revealed on 60 Minutes earlier this week--documents purportedly typed by the deceased commander of George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 and 1973, but actually produced on a personal computer using Microsoft Word. I predict--and here I'm going out on a limb 10-feet wide and only an inch off the ground--that it's only a matter of time before CBS admits it was deceived. If there's any honor and professional pride left in the CBS newsroom, they will then expose the party or parties who deceived them. Why did the premier news show in what was once reputed to be the premier television newsroom fall for such transparent fakes?"... ..."But the more important reason CBS was duped is that they wanted to believe the story. And the memos neatly fit the anti-Bush narrative that they believed to be true: Namely, Bush was a slacker at the end of his tour of duty and his superiors covered for him because they were under political pressure to do so. Here's a revealing anecdote reported by Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen in this morning's Washington Post:"... ..."Obviously, you can't authenticate a document by reading it to someone over the phone. (CBS claims to have had other "experts" examine the documents but has been unwilling to name them.) What this reporting should have suggested to CBS is that whoever forged the documents was someone who knew what CBS's sources would be saying--someone well informed on the anti-Bush scuttlebutt about his National Guard service. The "documents" neatly reflect the reigning anti-Bush theories of the events of 1972 and 1973 and perfectly buttress the anti-Bush narrative because they were produced by someone who was obsessing over that narrative and understood that reporters would need "documentation" to advance the story. Just as obviously, the journalists who went into overdrive for the National Guard story when the phony memos were released, with few exceptions, want to see Kerry win and Bush lose. This makes them suckers for a good anti-Bush story. It's conventional to call this media bias and be shocked by it. But really it's just human nature. That's why we have to be especially skeptical of the stories we fall in love with. And that's why CBS screwed up."