In a lengthy post on this latest Washington Post Rathergate article, Dale Franks at Q and O make this assertion. They still don’t seem to understand that the issue isn’t just that the documents were forged. The issue is that CBS News should’ve known they were forged.
This is way too generous. Of course CBS knew the documents were forged. They chose to ignore that. Here are excerpts from the Post article's timeline narrative. That same day, back in the ninth-floor offices of "60 Minutes," across West 57th Street from the CBS Broadcast Center, warnings about the story began to surface.
Emily Will of North Carolina, one of the experts CBS had asked to examine the memos, sent Mapes an e-mail outlining her concerns over discrepancies in Killian's signature. She also phoned CBS and raised more questions about whether the typography in the memos existed in 1972 and differences with other military documents. "They looked like trouble to me," Will said.
Linda James, a document examiner who lives near Mapes, was raising similar questions. The two memos she looked at "had problems," James recalled telling CBS, and she could not rule out that they had been "produced on a computer."
In Mainstream Media there is the presumption of integrity on the part of Dan Rather and CBS. Anyone who's been reading this blog knows I don't share that sentiment. Because of this presumption CBS and Mainstream Media take the position that it's legitimate to try to shift the discussion to the content of the memos, instead of their authenticity. That implies something else we all already know, that throughout Mainstream Media there is the presumption of Bush-Cheney guilt. Name the topic. Whatever it is, they're guilty. WMD, Halliburton, Abu Ghraib, it's all the same. But Mainstream Media has been wrong every time, and they're wrong on this one, too. The problem is they don't care. When the facts get in the way of their beliefs, they stop talking about the facts.
No, this time it's not about George W. Bush, it's about Dan Rather and CBS deliberately lying to the American public in an attempt to swing this election to John Kerry. This is about fraud. This is about the breathtaking arrogance of Dan Rather and CBS who remain convinced that they can pull it off, and who haven't given up trying. And it will be of huge interest to me, how long the rest of Mainstream Media will continue to assist them.
You know what the truly sad thing is for these four individuals and their families? This story, if actually true, wouldn't have amouted to a hill of beans. Pathetic.
Posted by: Scott | January 10, 2005 at 12:39 PM