But Fails to Challenge "The Thrust of the Charges" Against Him

An apology isn't enough. By his own repeatedly-declared standard, the failure to challenge the "thrusts" and "essences" of charges constitutes evidence of the charges' accuracy.

RatherBiased.com lists 20 journalistic breaches CBS News must admit to and apologize for. As that site is currently down, probably because it's being hammered by traffic, I hope they won't mind my reposting their 20 Journalistic Crimes Committed By 60 Minutes.

We hope, but are not expecting, that the network will also apologize for the following:

1. Failing to use the best document experts it could find,

2. Hiring a signature expert to look at a copied document when he himself said earlier that doing such a thing was foolish,

3. Ignoring and lying about the testimony of those it did hire,

4. Failing to interview Marian Knox as well as the others listed above,

5. Not interviewing anyone directly connected with Lt. Col Killian,

6. Not informing viewers that Staudt had retired a year-and-a-half before the time he was supposedly trying to help "sugarcoat" Bush's record,

7. Failing to inform viewers that not a single verified document signed by Killian or his fellow officers during the time period used the typographical techniques used in the CBS Memos,

8. Not mentioning Ben Barnes's partisan background enough,

9. Not disclosing the 30-year friendship of the two Texas Democrats Barnes and Rather,

10. Failing to even know who producer Mary Mapes's document source was before the broadcast,

11. Dishonestly impugning the motives of critics,

12. Using its news broadcasts to defend a bad report instead of examining how it could be wrong,

13. Never once featuring a single document expert on the air who doubted CBS's claims,

14. Putting total non-experts on the air to spin the preferred "authentic" line even though CBS would not allow them to see its documents,

15. Not mentioning that Killian never kept notes and hated to type,

16. Failing to provide the public with copies of the documents as close as possible to the ones CBS obtained,

17. Not finding out if the office in which Killian worked even had a typewriter capable of duplicating most of the complex formatting used in the CBS documents (it did not),

18. Using the testimony of a vehemently anti-Bush author to prove its case and simply referring to him as an author who "wrote two books on the subject,"

19. Failing to inform viewers that its document source was someone who hated George Bush,

20. Not telling viewers that one of its key (if not the key) sources was a man known to be mentally unstable and one who has lodged false
accusations against Bush for years.

RatherBiased.com has a lot more than that, too, and you go on over the moment their servers are back.

So, Mr. Rather: Will you respond to the "questions" raised by these documents?

Posted by: Ace at 09:54 AM | Comments (3)
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Thanks to Mike:

The man who gave CBS (search) controversial documents that have fueled a firestorm of controversy over President Bush's Vietnam-era Texas Air National Guard (search) service has admitted that he deliberately misled the television network, CBS said Monday in a statement.

Over the weekend, CBS' veteran news anchor Dan Rather (search) flew to Texas to interview Bill Burkett (search), a man who was believed by some to be the source of the memos.

CBS said Monday that Burkett did in fact mislead a CBS News producer about the documents. The network acknowledged that, based upon subsequent reporting on questions about the documents, it cannot prove they are authentic and therefore, they should not have been used in its "60 Minutes" report on Sept. 8.

"Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source," network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said in the statement.

Burkett's full interview will be aired on Monday night's edition of "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather," from 6:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. EDT.

...

Burkett has urged Democratic activists to wage "war" against Republican "dirty tricks."

Adding more fuel to the fire, Burkett, who lives in Abilene, Texas, has now also said that he passed the documents on to former Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat and triple amputee from Vietnam, who is working with the Kerry campaign.

Burkett's had a long-running feud with Bush over health benefits and the Texas National Guard. Bob Hunter, a Republican legislator who investigated Burkett's charges, told FOX News he found them to be groundless.

I'm ever so glad that CBS News wouldn't employ the opinions or claims of "poltical partisans" in putting together its story.

Meanwhile... "Internet political partisans" of a liberal stripe are suddenly angry about news organizations rushing to print unsubstantiated allegations-- unfortunately failing to notice that Burkett himself has substantiated this particular allegation.

It never fails, does it? Whenever there's a story that seems to hurt liberals, liberals immediately begin claiming it's a "distraction" from the "real issues," i.e., the issues that can be used to hurt conservatives.

Posted by: Ace at 09:46 AM | Comments (5)
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10. "We Get Breaking Stories to You Fast-- Without All That Tedious, Time-Consuming Fact-Checking That Slows Down Amateur Internet Bloggers"

9. "Maybe It Wasn't Such a Good Idea to Fire Connie Chung After All"

8. "Your Best Mix of National News -- 50% Fake, 50% Accurate"

7. "We Don't Just Read News Scripts -- We Read News SuperScripts. That's the CBS News Difference."

6. "Let's Face It, the Last Two Weeks Would Have Been Boring As Hell Without Us"

5. "Ethics, Schmethics-- Bush Is a Jagwad and You Know It"

4. ""We've Cut Out the Middlemen Between the DNC and the Liberal Media, And We Pass the Savings on to You, the Consumer"

3. "CBS News: A Proven Record of Trust With Stories' 'Thrusts,' 'Hearts,' and 'Essences;' With Actual 'Facts,' Not So Much"

2. "Because When You're Number Three You Try Harder, But Not So Hard As to Actually Get a Story Right"

...and the Number One New CBS News Slogan...

1. "CBS News: Some of this crap might even be true"

Dan Rather Retirement Watch Update: Whoops! I completely forgot to check the time.

At the tone, the Dan Rather Retirement Watch displays a time of

(bong)

11:57PM -- one minute closer to midnight ("spending time with his family" and/or "quitting to work on his life's dream, a coffee-table book compilation of the nation's best 'railroad songs'")

Posted by: Ace at 08:51 AM | Comments (3)
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Scumbags! That's not techincally profanity, I guess, but people seem to avoid it as if it were in fact one of the genuine four-letter words. I know I don't use it-- there's something nastier about the word than, say, "fuckface," which is nearly endearing.

So, we've gone from being "idiots" to being "scumbags" in the space of two weeks. I can't wait for Terezzza's next round of "candid, refreshing" -- and plutocratically bitchy -- insults against anyone who dares oppose her gigolo husband.

From L to R: Senator John Thurston Kerry; pop legend Sir Elton John.

Posted by: Ace at 08:32 AM | Comments (8)
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Dan Rather cops to the obvious a mere twelve days after everyone ele in the world knew in this statement:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question—and their source—vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically.

Why the continued, face-saving reluctance to simply say, "They're forged"? Note how he phrases it-- he just "no longer has the confidence" in the documents.

They're proven forgeries, Dan.

I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where—if I knew then what I know now—I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

Except, of course, getting the President and swinging the election the Democratic candidate you claim you're not biased in favor of.

The New York Times reports on CBS' too-reluctant recognition of the transparently obvious:

Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and several people close to the reporting process said his answers to Mr. Rather's questions led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that the memos had come from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material.

It was unclear last night if Mr. Burkett had told Mr. Rather that he had been misled about the documents' provenance or that he had been the one who did the misleading.

In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Burkett declined to answer any questions about the documents.

But CBS News continues spinning anyway:

Yesterday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail.

They ran with documents received anonymously and with no actual human being willing to vouch for their authenticity and provenance?

In court, you can't just peddle documents to the jury. Records usually require "authentication" -- some live human witness capable of saying, "These documents are genuine; I have first hand knowledge of their making."

How on earth did CBS News decide it wasn't obligated to similarly authenticate the forgeries?

In an interview last night she declined to name the producer who told her this but said the producer was in a position to know. CBS News officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the night before the initial "60 Minutes'' report that it would face questions from documents experts.

Let's just say that I have a greater confidence in Ms. Will's word than Ms. Mapes'. Ms. Will hasn't proveably lied to me yet-- something that can't be said for the "highly respected" Mapes.

In the coming days CBS News officials plan to focus on how the network moved ahead with the report when there were warning signs that the memorandums were not genuine.

Ms. Will is one of two documents experts consulted by the network who said they raised doubts about the material before the segment was broadcast. Another expert, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he had vouched only for Colonel Killian's signatures on the records and not the authenticity of the records themselves. Mr. Matley said he could not rule out that the signatures had been cut and pasted from official records pertaining to Colonel Killian.

In examining where the network had gone wrong, officials at CBS News turning their attention to Ms. Mapes, one of their most respected producers, who was riding particularly high this year after breaking news about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for the network.

In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes'' Wednesday edition, said that he did not initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but that he did not see any reason to doubt them. He said he believed Ms. Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt upon the essential thrust of the report.

"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day,'' he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility.''

Fake but accurate. Fake but accurate. Stonewall. Spin. Rinse. Repeat.

Not good enough, Mr. Rather.

Not nearly good enough. The boycott continues until CBS News admits precisely what it did, and why it did it. And until the responsible parties are fired -- including Andrew Heyward and Dan Rather and, of course, Mary Mapes (but she's already getting her resume together-- "When in doubt, fire a producer").

Update: American Daughter has video of what she claims is a an F-16 targetting Fallujah terrorists, but my "sources" inform me it's actually a "recreation" -- fake, yet accurate -- of bloggers bringing down CBS News.

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 AM | Comments (8)
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I actually can't confirm this is the text of Burkett's actual message, because Yahoo now seems to be requiring membership in Burkett's Texas Democrats Yahoo group to read messages. I don't know if it's always been like this or if that group too is now "scrubbing" the record.

HawkeyeLonewolf tells me that at this address is an interesting post by Burkett.

This is the text as Hawkeye reports it. If anyone has a membership or can verify this, I'd appreciate it:

...Now dammit, I've worked with Rove, Hughes, Bartlett and Bush. They knew he was a little "pretty". There was even a story about Rove's comments about Edwards being a little "pretty". What that means is that they knew he wouldn't be able to scrap. And they haven't.

So when someone claws Kerry what does he do, "Whine" to the FEC?

I spent some time on the phone with the Kerry campaign seniors yesterday after having to threaten to whip a little ass in order to get through seven layers of bureaucratic kids trying to get a job after the election. I talked with Max Clelend.

I hope he got the message, but even if he did, I'm not sure that his side of the issue can beat out the other half of the advisors. And that's a problem. There seem to be two factions within the Kerry advisors = one camp is the Gore holdover group who say play nice, we may make someone mad. The other includes people like Max Cleland who say kick ass. And the candidate can't seem to follow instincts and lay down some blood. The comments that he made Friday would have been effective if they'd been made the Monday after the convention, but two weeks later just doesn't work.

I'm concerned.

You have a candidate and all of us do. Your candidates are afraid to fight down and dirty. The people say they're sick of this- and they are. But Bush has nothing to lose. And he will do ANYTHING to get what he wants. SO when they do the attacks, if the turnout is lowered, as you are concerned, then he wins. If he scars Kerry, he wins. He wins in all directions unless there is a counterattack.

I said all of this to Max. I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. He said counterattack. SO I gave them the information to do it with.

But none of them have called me back.

No, I'm sorry but until this party and this candidate learn to handle Bush, we in all honesty will lose this election. We have the emotion, the backlash, the issues, and discontent, but we don't have the passion for a fight. And that's what is about to get the elec tion tight enough that the dirty tricks in the voting booth and counting will work.

I've tried everything. Why do you think that my knowledge and ability was sufficient that I received death threat and actual shots fired at me? It's because I was willing not only to break ranks, but to fight. And I know how to fight them.

But the DNC is afraid of me, I guess, and afraid to do what I suggest.
...

I've volunteered to come back to come back out with more. Others have too. But this candidate doesn't know how to fight and the campaign organization seems destined to loss in spite of the victory handed it by circumstance.

I'm sorry, I hope I can change my observation - and soon. But every time we get momentum, we take a week off and lose focus.

George Bush is vulnerable on the issues. So put him on the defensive dammit.

And you don't do that by being a nice guy.

...

For me, I've been to war. Most of you have quickly forgotten that I was the insider who broke ranks with the Bush Team and fought them in the legislature when our Democratic State legislators and LT. Gov were in bed with Bush to make him President. I fought many of the people whom you now consider HEROS because of Ardmore and Albuqurque. Why? because Bush was as corrput in Texas as he has been in Washington. And I exposed it.

While I hear all of you commenting and cannonizing the Repblicans who have jumped ship from the Bush Administration - Ambassador Wilson, Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, etc

Ahem. Clarke and Wilson-- Republicans? As Eric Stratton said, "Forget it, he's rolling."

and then watching as the Modereate Republicans like Richard Holbrooke, and John McCain take to the headlines building compromise and disarmament, I know that I was one of the first on June 25, 1997; followed by the funergate scam and others.

If you want to turn this cuntry around, it can't be done with Bush in the White House. If you want to return freedom to our streets, it can't be done with Bush in the White House and Ashcroft as DOJ. So quit letting Ashcroft hide. Call him out.

If you want fiscal responsibility returned, you can't have that with Bush in the White House and the senate under the control of the Republicans.

Do more than talk. Be ready to gird up and go into battle. And when you go to battle there are scars. This isn't a gentlemanly event. It's war. And in war people get cut up, injured and killed. Take some risk. Be a leader nationally and at home. Quit just waiting for this victory to come to you so you can get some nice appointment out of it. If you wait, it will be a very long wait.

Bill Burkett

Posted by: Ace at 10:46 AM | Comments (16)
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Sorry for all of the sirens, but I think they're all pretty much deserved. Mark tips me to a not-so-shadowy link:

In an Aug. 21 posting, Burkett referred to a conversation with former senator Max Cleland (D-Ga.) about the need to counteract Republican tactics: "I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. He said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with. But none of them have called me back."

Cleland confirmed that he had a two- or three-minute conversation by cellphone with a Texan named Burkett in mid-August while he was on a car ride. He remembers Burkett saying that he had "valuable" information about Bush, and asking what he should with it. "I told him to contact the [Kerry] campaign," Cleland said. "You get this information tens of times a day, and you don't know if it is legit or not."

Posted by: Ace at 07:06 PM | Comments (34)
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They're eager to report him as a "well-regarded Texan;" as a rabid partisan Democrat who compares Bush to Hitler, not so much.

Posted by: Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (6)
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10. Says that he invented spicy Chinese chicken-and-broccoli dish; has filed an infringement lawsuit against famed military leader/cooking enthusiast General Tso

9. Keeps insisting his "maid is stealing from" him, which is doubly embarassing, because 1) she's not stealing from him and 2) she's not his maid, she's Big Brother hostess Julie Chen

8. Claims that he leaves on his car's left-turn indicator for weeks at a time "as an act of political dissent"

7. Won't stop pitching his idea for an Apprentice-inspired reality television show called "The Geriatric Nurse;" has already trademarked the show's catch-phrase, "I made a stinky; come wipe me"

6. Has begun screaming "Get out of my yard!" to squirrels; also occasionally yells this at trees

5. Keeps angering Ed Bradley by telling him, "Back in my day, guys who wore earrings were trying to tell you something, and it wasn't 'God Save the Queen'"

4. Just accepted an invitation to join Senator Robert Byrd for a weekend of fishin', huntin', and Klannin'

3. Whenever Leslie Stahl walks by his office, embarasses her by shouting out "Man, I gots to get me some of that!"

2. Last year's personalized Christmas cards featured a creepy picture of a bound-and-gagged woman with the strange inscription, It puts the lotion in the basket-- Seasons Greetings from Dan

...and the number one sign Dan Rather has gone senile...

1. Claims that no one has yet challenged "the essence of his story" that he jumped the Snake River Canyon in 1975

Note: This was originally about Andy Rooney. I have "recontextualized" it for relevance in today's fast-moving media landscape

Posted by: Ace at 01:50 PM | Comments (12)
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It seems that I now too have "shadowy connections" linking me to both the Republican Party and a right-wing 527.

I guy I know has remind male voters, particularly in Wisconsin, that John Kerry refers to historic, famous Lambeau Field as "Lambert Field." Oh, and they'll also remind them he's an all-around cheesedick of the first order.

Check out the new Football Fans for Truth website. And, if you like the idea of their mission, toss 'em a few bucks.

They've got nothing to do with me, by the way. I know one of the guys, but I'm not actually involved. I've got to preserve my journalistic independence, you know. I'm "still making up my mind," a la Andrew Sullivan, between Bush and Kerry.

You think these guys are just screwing around? Well, they've already landed a full article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

Oh, and, by the way, also a full frickin' article in a tiny little newspaper called USAToday.

Posted by: Ace at 01:07 PM | Comments (9)
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