Captain’s Quarters has a link up that describes the long-awaited report from CBS on Rathergate, thusly:
It appears that the full report will give the blogosphere material for much rumination and discussion over the next few days. Whatever else, it isn’t the whitewash that most of us expected.
Really, Captain? I think there’s whitewash all over this thing. Check the panel’s own words, as you posted them:
The Panel has not been able to conclude with absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries.
Comon… how white does something need to be, before you start looking around for the brush?
The report does go on…
However, the Panel has identified a number of issues that raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and their content. With better reporting, these questions should have been raised before the September 8 Segment aired.
‘Better reporting’? How about simply ‘reporting’, huh? Somehow that never seems to make it into the menu for CBS.
Yes the report was hard on CBS, but I judge, given their history, that this is only because they needed the appearence of being hard on CBS. The bottom line here is CBS thought they had a serious hit against President Bush with the forged documents they submitted to the American people as genuine… and to this day CBS swears the documents were ‘falsified but accurate’, and thought thereby they could throw the election into the lap of the Democrats and John F’ing Kerry. They were driven to this point by a rabid foaming bias that all but the farthest gone can see clearly. That’s the truth. And the report didn’t say that truth. Rather still has a job.
I call that a whitewash of the first order.
Update: So do many others. Boortz for example, remains unconvinced, reminding us that there are…
“two big names are missing from the story: Dan Rather and CBS News President Andrew Heyward. It was Dan Rather that defended the story over and over on TV, grinding his political hatchet with the Bush family and refusing to admit the documents were forgeries. Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, says since The Dan is retiring from the anchor chair, that’s punishment enough. But he’s still going to be a reporter for 60 Minutes, he’ll still get paid and he won’t lose his job, unlike the others. It’s too bad CBS felt the need to protect Dan Rather to the end.
Also getting a pass is Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News. I’m not sure I understand this one. The senior VP gets canned because the story happened on her watch, yet the big cheese doesn’t so much as get a slap on the wrist. Too bad. Wrong message to send to the rank and file at that network.”
And, to the MSM in general, for that matter. James at OTB seems less than impressed.
James points to the above quote about absolute certainty on the docs being forged and says, rightly;
“What kind of standard of proof is “absolute certainty”? We put people to death based on mere “beyond a reasonable doubt” and hold people liable for people hundreds of millions in civil damaged on mere “preponderance of the evidence.” “Absolute certainty” is not only impossible to achieve but, frankly, rather a strange bar if “unimpeachable integrity” is the standard.”
If there’s a plus… a bright side in all of this, it is that CBS doesn’t need to worry about their credibility dropping lower. They may need to sandblast the bottom of the bucket to get it up, though.
Son of an Update: Hugh Hewitt makes a good case on this report being a whitewash, as well.
Bill Hobbs is doing a good job of tracking the reaction.
Tags: BitsBlog
