Food for thought

From the Department of Profundities (sp?), comes this little nugget of wisdom sent to my email by the sibling unit.

As the Puppy Blender would say, "Indeed".

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington.  And they tracked her calves to their stalls.  But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country.

Maybe we should give them all a cow.

Oh, this  is a shock

No, really - it is.

See-BS' Forgerygate has claimed four victims - including...and here's the shock...Mary Mapes, Dan Blather's Gal Friday™ and noted Bush-hater.  The bimbo who spent five years  trying to prove that W stood for A"W"OL.

Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated

Make note of that last part, Denizens:  Mapes was fired.  West, Howard and Murphy were asked to resign, but She Who Hated Bush With A Purple Passion™ was shitcanned.

Given that Blather himself is stepping down in March, it's not outside the realm of possibility that Andy Heyward approached him some time back and said, "Dan, ol' boy, I'll give you two choices - quit or be fired".

The [independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece] said a "myopic zeal" to be the first news organization to broadcast a groundbreaking story about Mr. Bush's National Guard service was a key factor in explaining why CBS News had produced a story that was neither fair nor accurate and did not meet the organization's internal standards.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't that usually  a good working definition of the word "bias"?

"The combination of a new 60 Minutes Wednesday management team, great deference given to a highly respected producer and the network's news anchor, competitive pressures, and a zealous belief in the truth of the segment seem to have led many to disregard some fundamental journalistic principles," the report said.

In other words, they were certain  they had the goods on that draft dodging redneck that was dumber than a rock - 'cause that's what Their Hero Dan Rather!!! said  he was - and they wanted to beat ABC, NBC and CNN to the punch, so they could be the ones to say, "We  took 'im down!!!  YEAHHHHHHH!!!!!

What was that old admonition about looking before leaping again???

The story, which aired last Sept. 8, relied on four documents allegedly written by one of Mr. Bush's Texas Air National Guard commanders in the early 1970s, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who is now dead. Questions about the authenticity of the documents were raised almost immediately.

After a stubborn 12-day defense of the story, CBS News conceded that it could not confirm the authenticity of the documents and asked former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press President Louis Boccardi to conduct an independent investigation into the matter.

IOW, guys, they got their asses handed to them by us bloggers.  You know...the Pajamahadeen.  We fact-checked their asses so fast that their heads made like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

Sweet.

Their findings were contained in a 224-page report made public on Monday. While the panel said it was not prepared to brand the Killian documents as an outright forgery, it raised serious questions about their authenticity and the way CBS News handled them.

Oh, of course they couldn't come right out and say those Microsoft Word  documents were forgeries.  To do so would mean that any future claims of objectivity would get their snot-nosed New York elitist asses laughed right out of Manhattan.  Not that that's not the case already, what with their news ratings clearly in the toilet and all.

The panel identified 10 serious defects in the preparation and reporting of the story that included failure to obtain clear authentication of the documents or to investigate controversial background of the source of the purported documents, retired Texas National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.

Well, of course  not!  They knew  that Bush was AWOL; they knew  he was a draft-dodger and a cokehead and Cthulu knows what  else - why go to the time & effort to fact-check what was so obvious???

The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was also faulted for calling Joe Lockhart, a senior official in the John Kerry campaign, prior to the airing of the piece, and offering to put Burkett in touch with him. The panel called Mapes' action a "clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias."

Appearance???   Yeah, and Michael Moore has the appearance  of being a fat fuck.

After rushing the piece to air, the panel said, CBS News compounded the error by blindly defending the story. In doing so, the news organization missed opportunities to set the record straight.

"The panel finds that once serious questions were raised, the defense of the segment became more rigid and emphatic, and that virtually no attempt was made to determine whether the questions raised had merit", the report concluded.

Naturally.  Goebbels' insistence that a lie told oft enough and all that.  A principle practiced so assiduously by Das Klintonreich  that the Lapdog Media™ thought they could get away with it, too.

The panel believes a turning point came on Sept. 10, when CBS News President Andrew Heyward ordered Betsy West to review the opinions of document examiners who had seen the disputed documents and the confidential sources supporting the story.

But no such investigation was undertaken.

And that surprises anyone...how?

"Had this directive been followed promptly, the panel does not believe that 60 Minutes Wednesday would have publicly defended the segment for another 10 days", the report said.

"Another 10 days"???  Hell, guys - Blather still believes that those documents are absolutely bona fide to this very friggin' minute!!!

And they wonder why most of us right-thinkers go to Fox to get our news...?