Well if they are their CEO thinks differently.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/network_of_the_gop.php
Network Of The GOP?
Richard Blow
September 30, 2004
The case of Dan Rather and the forged National Guard documents got a lot of attention because it involved a respected journalist making a stupid, amateurish mistake. But the hype should have ended there. CBS' decisions to hire a Republican politician to investigate the story—and, more recently, declining to run an investigative piece about Iraq—imply the network believes that politicians can and should police the media.
Richard Blow is the former executive editor of George magazine. He is author of American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and is writing a book about Harvard University.
It’s often said in politics that it’s not the crime that kills you, it’s the cover-up. How politicians react to a mistake can magnify the damage it causes.
In a sense, the same axiom applies to the matter of CBS, Dan Rather and the fake National Guard documents. Despite what conservatives keep insisting, it isn’t the broadcast of a news story based on forgeries that’s devastating to CBS. It’s the way that CBS has caved to political pressure in the wake of that broadcast.
From the start, the reaction to the 60 Minutes II piece has been much ado about politics and little about the conduct of journalism. Conservatives saw a chance to drive a stake into Dan Rather and CBS, two of their bogeymen ever since the publication of Bernard Goldberg’s bestseller, Bias. They wanted to count coup on Rather, take him out once and for all. (Though he’s probably more useful to the right wing if he stays on the air, in the same way that James Watt was manna from heaven for environmental groups.) And the fact that CBS’s documents looked fishy even to relatively untrained eyes gave conservatives the opportunity for which they lusted.
Now the network has added to its growing reputation as a GOP lapdog. First, it appointed a Republican former attorney general, Dick Thornburg, to its two-member panel investigating the National Guard story. The very idea of an outside panel is bad enough; news organizations should never concede the premise that they can’t police themselves. (When the New York Times was faced with investigating Jayson Blair, it didn’t hire Ann Coulter to re-report Blair’s stories.) To appoint a politician to the panel is to suggest that politicians know how to police the press better than the press does—and that they have authority over the media. They don’t, and they shouldn’t.
Following that, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, CBS’ owner, announced that he was supporting Bush in November, that it was what any businessman should do. No. It’s what any businessman trying to suck up to Bush should do.
Third, and perhaps most disturbing, CBS news chief Andrew Heyward then spiked a Sunday 60 Minutes report on the White House’s push for war in Iraq. According to a writer for Salon.com who saw the piece, it’s a powerful story which charges that the White House “either knowingly deceived the American people about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities or was grossly credulous.” A CBS spokesman announced that it would be “inappropriate” to air the piece so close to an election. I’m glad I’m not a spokesman, so I can sleep at night knowing that I don’t lie for a living. Of course, that’s exactly the kind of story a news organization should air before an election—a tough piece on one of the most important issues the country faces, the war in Iraq. CBS wouldn’t risk angering the White House at a time when it was already feeling vulnerable.
The people who run CBS have internalized the conservatives’ argument that their mistakes were political, and that consequently their responses should be the same. On both counts they’re wrong. They made journalistic mistakes, and all they have to do to regain people’s trust is admit them and fix them. That approach may take a while, but it does work better than abandoning your integrity.
