Originally posted by: Infohawk
Originally posted by: QED
Read
CBS's Report of the Independent Review Panel which explains in detail how this came about-- it is classic liberal bias.
If you'd like, I can summarize-- but it all is in there.
"[T]he Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the Segment or its content." That speaks for itself.
In any case, let's not turn this into a thread about Rathergate. Let's assume that certain people who caused the story to air were partisan hacks. The mere fact that CBS tried to rectify the situation contradicts the idea of a liberal bias. If they were truly biased, they could just keep putting out false information about Bush. But the truth is they are a corporation who's purpose is to sell advertising, not to sink candidates.
Furthermore, this is one story. The idea of the liberal MSM is that it is wide-spread. Again, how could such a bias be widespread in a market economy?
The panel explicitly says the cannot conclude there was a political agenda simply because they would have to literally get in the head of the reporters and producer who worked on the piece to prove it, and they obviously cannot do that.
And yes, CBS (as a corporation) did eventually do the right thing-- but as the Report states their initial reaction was to deny, deny, cherry-pick experts who would back up their cause, deny some more, and allow the same people who wrote and vetted the story to "investigate" the allegations that it was wrong. Of course, we were all shocked--SHOCKED!-- when they concluded they did a great job and that they stood by their story!
It wasn't until OTHER news outlets picked up on the story of the documents likely being forgeries that CBS finally relented and ordered an independent review-- but the question is, why did it take so long for CBS to get it right? I think it was because everyone at CBS that worked on the story genuinely believed that the underlying basis of the story was accurate-- i.e. it fit perfectly with their view of Bush-- and therefore, that in and of itself lent credence to the authenticity of the documents.
Like I said, I believe most bias is soft bias, where a reporter will intrinsically not question something something as much when it already fits their particular world-view. A prime illustration of this effect is
this thread: Someone on DailyKos posts that Palin cut funding for special needs children by 62% her first year as governor. A reporter for CNN finds out about it somehow (maybe she's a poster there, maybe someone e-mail it to her from there), and during an interview she proceeds to drill a McCain spokesman about it. The spokesman doesn't know anything about it-- but for good reason: it's entirely false. Had the reporter bothered to look at the budget figures for herself (which are posted right on Alaska's government website) she could have debunked it herself in 5 minutes before trying to embarras a McCain spokesman.
The same behavior is further exhibited in the thread I linked--as poster after poster only read the OP, and without bothering to verify what they read for themselves (or reading further down the thread where it is debunked), they instead just post "Oh yeah... I knew that Palin was a hypocrite!" or "Figures... typical Republican!". I know posters on here are not the same thing as journalists, but journalists still suffer from the same syndrome of wanting to believe what we want to believe.
