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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (68941)	9/10/2004 3:38:03 PM
From: gamesmistress	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793552

If there's no criminal investigation of any kind, when military documents are alleged to be forged, then people will think the documents are not forged. Here, BTW, are a couple of "blasts from the past" via the WSJ Opinion Journal. Shows how easily people can be duped when the media do not investigate sources. ...In 1992, Bill Clinton's presidential campaign was nearly ended when tapes between the Arkansas governor and cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers were released. At the time, KCBS, the network's owned-and-operated affiliate in Los Angeles, took the tape and submitted it to private detective and forensic tape expert Anthony Pellicano for analysis. Mr. Pellicano's conclusions that the tapes were "misleading" and "not credible" played a role in Mr. Clinton surviving the controversy. Only later was it learned that Mr. Pellicano had no formal training in evaluating tapes and was at the time being paid by Democratic sources to squelch "bimbo eruptions" surrounding Mr. Clinton. In other words, Mr. Clinton's own private eye was able to discredit one of the most damaging eruptions that preceded Monica Lewinsky. In his own memoirs published this year, Mr. Clinton confessed to the Flowers affair, contradicting his fierce denials at the time. Years later, Mr. Pellicano did demonstrate facility with tapes when police investigating threats made against Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch uncovered evidence that Mr. Pellicano had been involved and had also illegally wiretapped her conversations. Mr. Pellicano is now serving a 2 1/2 year federal prison term for possessing firearms and explosives. A federal grand jury is still investigating allegations that he wiretapped Hollywood celebrities. CBS would be wise to conclude its internal investigation quickly. If it results in bad news, it should cut its losses immediately. Meanwhile, former Clinton and Gore operative Chris Lehane, an acknowledged master of the black arts of opposition research, is already making the rounds on television hinting that Karl Rove could have planted fake National Guard documents to embarrass Democrats. If CBS is offered that scoop, my advice is simple: Don't take it, no matter how many documents with Karl Rove's signature you are shown. --John Fund Quick, Kick CBS While It's Down! Perhaps "60 Minutes" reporters will finally learn the wisdom of consulting their own company's in-house lawyers, who've proved better, more skeptical journalists over the years than the journalists themselves. Here's a bet they would have taken one look at the purported Bush-incriminating National Guard documents and asked why they didn't look the way paperwork did in the early 1970s. The same legal office finally stopped the network from going off the cliff in 1995 with a story about tobacco "whistleblower" Jeffrey Wigand, who claimed he had been subjected to a death threat for spilling the industry's beans. Never mind that an FBI investigator had already told the network that Mr. Wigand had faked the death threat himself. Never mind that the FBI also reported that his probable motive had been to entice CBS to run his story by adding a dash of sensationalism. Mike Wallace and Co. ignored the evidence and prostrated themselves before a "source" who was a liar and scam artist, forcing network suits finally to intervene to vet and all-but-kill the story. No, the truth never got much traction. Mr. Wigand went on to be played with flair by Russell Crowe in "The Insider," while CBS reporters and producers tried to turn themselves into martyrs of the first amendment. That won't happen this time. The purported National Guard documents were instantly ripped apart by Internet bloggers. An army of experts on fonts, typefaces and the history of typewriters materialized in cyberspace to do the detective work. Honorable mention also goes to two mainstream news organizations, ABC News and the Washington Post, which didn't ignore reality yesterday and lent a hand to exposing the dubiousness of CBS's scoop. The enduring mystery remains. Whom does CBS hire as its "news producers"? Mr. Wigand's substantive revelations were ho-hum commonplaces even at the time, and appealing to CBS News only because they were dressed up in the faux personal drama of a hunted industry turncoat. Likewise, anybody who looks at archival documents with any frequency is smacked in the eyes by the difference between typewritten and computer generated documents. The real problem here, though, is the hunt by TV news producers of mediocre intelligence for "scoops" -- which increasingly means artificial attempts to infuse information with drama suitable to an entertainment program. --Holman W. Jenkins Jr.