Power Line: Journalism In Decline

January 05, 2005

Journalism In Decline

Corey Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review sent us an email yesterday, with a link to his article in that magazine on the fake 60 Minutes documents. "You may be interested in this," he wrote. We were interested, all right, but we're sorry to report that the article is astonishingly bad.

Pein's perspective is sympathetic to Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS, and hostile toward the bloggers and others who exposed the fraud that 60 Minutes participated in, intentionally or otherwise. This gives his article a weirdly off-balance perspective. Pein holds out hope that the documents may not have been forgeries after all. He writes that:

We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15.

So this is now, apparently, an accepted journalistic standard: fake but accurate. Which means, I guess: fake, but they help the Democratic candidate. Again, Pein says:

Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.

Pein concludes with the wistful thought that maybe the mainstream media in general, and CBS in particular, didn't have to take a hit in connection with Memogate:

When the smoke cleared, mainstream journalism’s authority was weakened. But it didn’t have to be that way.

Pein's thesis is that the bloggers are just as blameworthy as CBS, if not more so:

[O]n close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule... CBS’s critics are guilty of many of the very same sins.

Pein thus joins Wonkette as the only commentators who, to my knowledge, have tried to argue that the bloggers' exposure of CBS's fraudulent documents was unfortunate. If the documents were fakes, their position is simply untenable. Recognizing this, Pein tries half-heartedly to show that the documents might have been genuine after all. But this effort is an utter failure:

1) Pein never even mentions the most important evidence that the documents were forgeries, i.e., their substantive errors. The most important such error was the anachronistic effort to portray Brig. Gen. "Buck" Staudt as pressuring Lt. Col. Bobby Hodges to "sugar coat" Lt. Bush's evaluation -- a year and a half after Staudt retired from the Texas Air National Guard. This was the most important of the CBS documents, and based on its content alone, it was an obvious fraud, both fake and inaccurate. Case closed.

2) Pein's discussion of the typographical issues, which were always over-emphasized in the mainstream media, is feeble. He refers to only one of the typographical disputes, the superscript "th," and quotes none other than Bobby Hodges for the proposition that “The typewriter can do that little ‘th,’ sure it can.” Hodges, of course, went on to tell the CJR that the documents were obvious forgeries. Of the many other typographical problems, not a word; nor is there any acknowledgement of the fact that, taken altogether, the 2004 fakes did not remotely resemble authentic 1973 documents, as we showed on this site within hours after the controversy erupted on Sept. 9.

3) Pein admits that there were many discrepancies between the forged documents and authentic military practice in National Guard units of the 1970's. Having acknowledged no fewer than 21 such discrepancies, Pein half-heartedly suggests that two of the 21 might (or might not) be in doubt, and draws the inexplicable conclusion that "the press should never accept as gospel the first explanation that comes along." (By "the press," he evidently doesn't mean CBS.)

Beyond that, Pein fails to address obvious problems in the 60 Minutes story. Astonishingly, he tries to shore up Bill Burkett's credibility, quoting someone who described Burkett as "honest and forthright." This might, I suppose, carry some weight with readers who don't know that Burkett never served in the Texas Air National Guard; doesn't know President Bush from Adam; has a longstanding grievance against the Texas National Guard (Army) because of medical benefits he was denied; has suffered a series of what he describes as mental breakdowns, and suffered another mental breakdown while being interviewed by USA Today after the Memogate scandal broke; told a bizarre and obviously false story about the origin of the CBS documents--he got a call from a mystery woman named Lucy Ramirez, who told him to go to the Texas Livestock Show; he went to the show, didn't see Ms. Ramirez, but was approached by a man whom he'd never seen before; the man handed him an envelope and walked away; in the envelope were the National Guard documents; he took them home, made copies, burned the originals--of course, what a natural thing to do--and then presented the copies to CBS.

Pein does acknowledge that Burkett admitted lying to CBS about the origin of the documents, but passes this off as a matter of little consequence. About the broader issue of the apparent coordination between CBS and the Democratic National Committe, Pein is completely silent. If Pein knows that Burkett wrote in an email to fellow Texas Democrats that he gave the fake documents to Max Cleland, acting on behalf of the Kerry campaign, he doesn't let on.

Pein tries to indict the bloggers for possibly having been wrong in a small minority of the questions they raised on September 9. On the other hand, he has not a word of criticism for CBS. Mary Mapes has said that she pursued the National Guard story for five years. Yet CBS never checked into any of the issues that were raised by the bloggers; never questioned Burkett's credibility; and never contacted any of the living people who could have given the lie to the fake documents, like General Staudt. In an interview shortly after Rathergate broke, former CBS Vice-president Jonathan Klein explained that CBS had deliberately decided not to interview Staudt and others because they were believed to be Republicans, and CBS wanted its story to be objective. That's CBS's idea of objectivity--interview Democrats only--and apparently it's the Columbia Journalism Review's standard, too.

Pein tries to argue that the mainstream media talked to various friends and associates of President Bush after the CBS scandal broke, and identified them as such, but somehow did not sufficiently portray them as "right wing," etc. For example:

Joe Allbaugh was usually identified in press accounts — in The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, to name a few — as Bush’s old chief of staff. He is much more. In 1999 Allbaugh, the self-described “heavy” of the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post, “There isn’t anything more important than protecting [Bush] and the first lady.”

Wow, there's a failing. Only describing Allbaugh as President Bush's former chief of staff wasn't enough to alert the audience to the fact that he was a dreaded Republican, whose knowledge should be disregarded.

On the other hand, Pein is remarkably sympathetic to the views of Bill Burkett, which, by any normal definition, are far out of the mainstream, compared to any of the "right wingers" whose information, Pein implies, should have been banned from media coverage of the scandal:

[M]any suppositions about Burkett are based on standards that were not applied evenly across the board. In November and December the first entry for “Bill Burkett” in Google, the most popular reference tool of the twenty-first century, was on a blog called Fried Man. It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign.

I could go on, but there is little point in doing so. CBS ostensibly "worked" on the National Guard story for years. They took fake documents from a notoriously unstable source who had no first-hand knowledge of President Bush's National Guard career, and who could not account for where he got them. On their face, the documents looked nothing like authentic National Guard memos of the 1970s that were in CBS's possession, but CBS asked no questions. CBS carried out no investigation to determine whether the memos were genuine, and made a point of not talking to people who were ostensibly quoted in the memos to determine whether the documents were accurate. They put the documents before the American public in the heat of an election campaign, and closely coordinated their story with a Democratic National Committee advertising campaign which dovetailed perfectly with the fake documents, and which began the morning after their broadcast. When questioned about the documents' apparent fraudulence, they stonewalled, and Dan Rather guaranteed the American people that the documents were authentic, because they came from an unimpeachable source.

The bloggers, on the other hand, began questioning the documents within hours after they appeared; raised many logical questions about their authenticity, the vast majority of which turned out to be valid; pointed out anachronisms within the documents that proved that their contents were false; and were ultimately proved correct in their suspicion that the documents were fakes. Nearly all of which occurred, not over a period of years, which CBS had to pursue its "story," but over the space of twelve hours.

And the Columbia Journalism Review thinks it is the bloggers who are blameworthy in this story. Sad. Very sad. But I guess we know whose side the "journalists" are on.

UPDATE: Upon reflection, I realize that I was unfair to the estimable Wonkette. While she has said that there were negative as well as positive aspects to the bloggers' role in Rathergate, she has not actually suggested that it is unfortunate that the fraud was unmasked. As far as I know, Mr. Pein is alone in that belief, except, of course, for certain CBS employees.

FURTHER UPDATE: Mr. Pein has tried to respond to our critique here. The response, frankly, is so weak that it is not worth spending much time on. I will belabor one point, however. Mr. Pein writes:

Buck Staudt, who was named in the memos as pressuring to "sugar coat" Bush's evaluation, had indeed resigned from the Guard before the date on the memos. There are people who say that Staudt did have influence after he left the Guard, though those I've spoken to are reluctant to go on the record. Meanwhile, the chief source who disputed CBS's claim that Staudt held influence after he left the Guard was a Dallas realtor whose connections to Bush defenders in Memogate were not noted in the press. All I'm saying is, in a story like this, the connections and leanings of sources should be noted, whether liberal or conservative.

I find this completely bizarre. First of all, to accept the idea that Gen. Staudt somehow had "influence" after he retired seems absurd, especially when those who assert this claim "are reluctant to go on the record." Yes, I'll bet they're reluctant! I'm no expert on military matters, but the suggestion that a Lt. Col. would accept orders from a retired officer of any rank is so ridiculous that one can only wonder what preconceived bias could make such an assertion plausible. But Pein compounds the felony: not only does he give this anonymous and intrinsically ridiculous theory credence, he goes on to say that the "chief source who disputed CBS's claim that Staudt had influence after he left the Guard" was a Republican! This is simply unbelievable. An anonymous Democratic source, who won't reveal his name because his assertion is so inherently incredible, is contradicted by a Republican who is willing to step forward and be quoted in his own name, and the only problem Pein can see is that the Republican's "connections" to defenders of President Bush were not "noted in the press." Hey, how about the connections between the anonymous Democrat and various critics of President Bush? Were they "noted in the press?" No, because the miserable coward wouldn't even give his name! Assuming, of course, that this hypothetical, anonymous person even exists.

And how about General Staudt? He surely could have commented on the anonymous claim that he somehow emerged from retirement to influence a Lieutenant's evaluation. In fact, when he was finally asked, after the CBS fraud had been exposed, he said that he had nothing to do with the Texas Air National Guard after he retired. But CBS avoided Gen. Staudt like the plague. It listened to anonymous sources, exclusively, not to high-ranking officers who had served their country honorably for decades.

Beyond that, Mr. Pein's defense of CBS News is too pitiful to warrant further comment.

Posted by John at 02:14 AM |

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