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For More Media Bias, here is a column from Frank Rich:

January 16, 2005
FRANK RICH
All the President’s Newsmen

NE day after the co-host Tucker Carlson made his farewell appearance and two days after the new president of CNN made the admirable announcement that he would soon kill the program altogether, a television news miracle occurred: even as it staggered through its last nine yards to the network guillotine, “Crossfire” came up with the worst show in its fabled 23-year history.

This was a half-hour of television so egregious that it makes Jon Stewart’s famous pre-election rant seem, if anything, too kind. This time “Crossfire” wasn’t just “hurting America,” as Mr. Stewart put it, by turning news into a nonsensical gong show. It was unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, complicit in the cover-up of a scandal.

I do not mean to minimize the CBS News debacle and other recent journalistic outrages at The New York Times and elsewhere. But the Jan. 7 edition of CNN’s signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything that might resemble the truth.

On this particular “Crossfire,” the featured guest was Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist (for papers like The Washington Times and The Detroit Free Press, among many others, according to his Web site). Thanks to investigative reporting by USA Today, he had just been unmasked as the frontman for a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers’ money was quietly siphoned to him through the Department of Education and a private p.r. firm so that he would “regularly comment” upon (translation: shill for) the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy in various media venues during an election year. Given that “Crossfire” was initially conceived as a program for tough interrogation and debate, you’d think that the co-hosts still on duty after Mr. Carlson’s departure might try to get some answers about this scandal, whose full contours, I suspect, we are only just beginning to discern.

But there is nothing if not honor among bloviators. “On the left,” as they say at “Crossfire,” Paul Begala, a Democratic political consultant, offered condemnations of the Bush administration but had only soft questions and plaudits for Mr. Williams. Three times in scarcely as many minutes Mr. Begala congratulated his guest for being “a stand-up guy” simply for appearing in the show’s purportedly hostile but entirely friendly confines. When Mr. Williams apologized for having crossed “some ethical lines,” that was enough to earn Mr. Begala’s benediction: “God bless you for that.”

“On the right” was the columnist Robert Novak, who “in the interests of full disclosure” told the audience he is a “personal friend” of Mr. Williams, whom he “greatly” admires as “one of the foremost voices for conservatism in America.” Needless to say, Mr. Novak didn’t have any tough questions, either, but we should pause a moment to analyze this “Crossfire” co-host’s disingenuous use of the term “full disclosure.”

Last year Mr. Novak had failed to fully disclose - until others in the press called him on it - that his son is the director of marketing for Regnery, the company that published “Unfit for Command,” the Swift boat veterans’ anti-Kerry screed that Mr. Novak flogged relentlessly on CNN and elsewhere throughout the campaign. Nor had he fully disclosed, as Mary Jacoby of Salon reported, that Regnery’s owner also publishes his subscription newsletter ($297 a year). Nor has Mr. Novak fully disclosed why he has so far eluded any censure in the federal investigation of his outing of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Plame, while two other reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time, are facing possible prison terms in the same case. In this context, Mr. Novak’s “full disclosure” of his friendship with Mr. Williams is so anomalous that it raised many more questions than it answers.

That he and Mr. Begala would be allowed to lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on a show produced by television’s self-proclaimed “most trusted” news network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation of “news” metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism. But the ugly bigger picture reaches well beyond “Crossfire” and CNN.

Mr. Williams has repeatedly said in his damage-control press appearances that he was being paid the $240,000 only to promote No Child Left Behind. He also routinely says that he made the mistake of taking the payola because he wasn’t part of the “media elite” and therefore didn’t know “the rules and guidelines” of journalistic conflict-of-interest. His own public record tells us another story entirely. While on the administration payroll he was not only a cheerleader for No Child Left Behind but also for President Bush’s Iraq policy and his performance in the presidential debates. And for a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

He took to CNN last October to give his own critique of the CBS News scandal, pointing out that the producer of the Bush-National Guard story, Mary Mapes, was guilty of a conflict of interest because she introduced her source, the anti-Bush partisan Bill Burkett, to a Kerry campaign operative, Joe Lockhart. In this Mr. Williams’s judgment was correct, but grave as Ms. Mapes’s infraction was, it isn’t quite in the same league as receiving $240,000 from the United States Treasury to propagandize for the Bush campaign on camera. Mr. Williams also appeared with Alan Murray on CNBC to trash Kitty Kelley’s book on the Bush family, on CNN to accuse the media of being Michael Moore’s “p.r. machine” and on Tina Brown’s CNBC talk show to lambaste Mr. Stewart for doing a “puff interview” with John Kerry on “The Daily Show” (which Mr. Williams, unsurprisingly, seems to think is a real, not a fake, news program).

But perhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all “journalists,” was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced “cheap shot journalism” in which “the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective.”

This is a scenario out of “The Manchurian Candidate.” Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, “Stolen Honor,” under the rubric of “news” in prime time just before Election Day. (After fierce criticism, Sinclair retreated from that plan.) Thus the Williams interview with the vice president, implicitly presented as an example of the kind of “objective” news Mr. Cheney endorses, was in reality a completely subjective, bought-and-paid-for fake news event for a broadcast company that barely bothers to fake objectivity and both of whose chief executives were major contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The Soviets couldn’t have constructed a more ingenious or insidious plot to bamboozle the citizenry.

Ever since Mr. Williams was exposed by USA Today, he has been stonewalling all questions about what the Bush administration knew of his activities and when it knew it. In his account, he was merely a lowly “subcontractor” of the education department. “Never was the White House ever mentioned anytime during this,” he told NBC’s Campbell Brown, as if that were enough to deflect Ms. Brown’s observation that “the Department of Education works for the White House.” For its part, the White House is saying that the whole affair is, in the words of the press secretary, Scott McClellan, “a contracting matter” and “a decision by the Department of Education.” In other words, the buck stops (or started) with Rod Paige, the elusive outgoing education secretary who often appeared with Mr. Williams in his pay-for-play propaganda.

But we now know that there have been at least three other cases in which federal agencies have succeeded in placing fake news reports on television during the Bush presidency. The Department of Health and Human Services, the Census Bureau and the Office of National Drug Control Policy have all sent out news “reports” in which, to take one example, fake newsmen purport to be “reporting” why the administration’s Medicare prescription-drug policy is the best thing to come our way since the Salk vaccine. So far two Government Accountability Office investigations have found that these Orwellian stunts violated federal law that prohibits “covert propaganda” purchased with taxpayers’ money. But the Williams case is the first one in which a well-known talking head has been recruited as the public face for the fake news instead of bogus correspondents (recruited from p.r. companies) with generic eyewitness-news team names like Karen Ryan and Mike Morris.

Or is Mr. Williams merely the first one of his ilk to be exposed? Every time this administration puts out fiction through the news media - the “Rambo” exploits of Jessica Lynch, the initial cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire - it’s assumed that a credulous and excessively deferential press was duped. But might there be more paid agents at loose in the media machine? In response to questions at the White House, Mr. McClellan has said that he is “not aware” of any other such case and that he hasn’t “heard” whether the administration’s senior staff knew of the Williams contract - nondenial denials with miles of wiggle room. Mr. Williams, meanwhile, has told both James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times and David Corn of The Nation that he has “no doubt” that there are “others” like him being paid for purveying administration propaganda and that “this happens all the time.” So far he is refusing to name names - a vow of omertà all too reminiscent of that taken by the low-level operatives first apprehended in that “third-rate burglary” during the Nixon administration.

If CNN, just under new management, wants to make amends for the sins of “Crossfire,” it might dispatch some real reporters to find out just which “others” Mr. Williams is talking about and to follow his money all the way back to its source.

Abandon? To abandon is to make a conscious choice to leave those standards behind. I think this was a matter of overconfidence. Combine that with deadline pressures, and you have the cause right there. You can’t check things forever, and if you believe your evidence is good, then you run with it. Only there were things they should have checked, and didn’t. They should have remembered the old maxim: If your mother tells you she loves you, get confirmation from a second source.

I don’t know if it was bias or just arrogance, but I was appalled by the way Dan Rather stuck to his story even after he had to admit he didn’t have evidence to back it up.

You all remember. He said something like, besides the fact that my evidence doesn’t prove it, what I told you is substantially correct. That goes up there with the question, “besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play.”

Twenty years ago, Dan Rather would have gotten away with the whole affair. The grumbling about the documents being false would have been effectively kept out of the mainstream media. It is thanks to the Internet that this story got out.

“He said something like, besides the fact that my evidence doesn’t prove it, what I told you is substantially correct.”

Which was essentially the case. Some of the evidence was bunk. But there was also testimony from a person to the effect that Bush got special treatment. And that secretary also backed up that story, as I recall.

I think it’s interesting that CBS, having recieved bad evidence, actually looked into this and fired people. Whereas Bush went to war in Iraq on “faulty intelligence” and Tenet gets a medal.

“Combine that with deadline pressures, and you have the cause right there. You can’t check things forever, and if you believe your evidence is good, then you run with it.”

The problem is that they didn’t check things well even once, so the problem of overchecking doesn’t really come into play.

The story was not new. It had been well researched, documented and reported before the 2000 election. The only thing that was new was the fraudulant documents. These documents were provided by a source with a 6+ year axe to grind against Bush. This source did not have the documents in 2000. He had no credible explanation for his recent ability to produce the documents. He was producing copies. Those copies raised flags from the the document experts, whose concerns were ignored. CBS contacted the opposition campaign before airing the show. When the fraud was exposed by a number of typographic experts across the world, Dan Rather came on TV and asserted that the documents came from an unimpeachable source—the opposite of what really happened.

CBS should change the name to See BS. That is all I see at that network news site. I would rather that Rather ‘fess up and put this sordid piece of trash behind him. And also stay retired. Because there are so many people re-tired of his bias.

Sebastian-
I believe in another part of my response, I conceded the mistake. That’s why I called it overconfidence. The documents did not really introduce anything new, but rather confirmed something people already thought to be true. I think if the material was more novel, there might have been more concern about the origins. But on the 24 hour news cycle, the temptation is obviously there to run with stuff that doesn’t seem odd. This, as opposed to the very novel accusations from the SwiftVets, who were alleging all kinds of misconduct on John Kerry’s part not supported by previous eyewitness accounts or official records. It is human nature to accept more easily that which fits a pre-existing pattern.

There should have been greater scrutiny on the documents, especially on the producer’s part. No excuses there. But its silly to isolate CBS in terms of bad journalism, especially with FOXnews out there, getting things badly wrong. CBS gets targeted because people expect better of them.

CBS gets bad intel and goes ahead with a story. No one gets killed, and now you’re pissed at them? Bush gets bad intel, sends over 1,000 soldiers to their death and you find every excuse in the book to explain why he would publicly go forward with sensational WMD “news”?

Right-wing hypocrisy at its best. At least there is a huge sense of damage on Rather’s career. The same cannot be said of the irresponsible “reporter” sitting in the White House.

ciaran

ciaran, wish I’d said that.

Me too, ray!

I also liked William’s comment:
“I think it’s interesting that CBS, having recieved bad evidence, actually looked into this and fired people. Whereas Bush went to war in Iraq on “faulty intelligence” and Tenet gets a medal”.

Minor point: the Bush administration received good intel and bad intel re Iraq. They chose to ignore what turned out to be good, and accentuated the bad, because that fit the political needs. The House Committee specifically restricted itself to investigating intelligence, NOT the political uses of it. This political manipulation has not been looked into by the Congress, for the simple reason that Republicans chair the committees, and can prevent it. To pretend the invasion of Iraq was just a matter of ‘bad intel’ is wrong. It was a lie from the start.

CBS gets bad intel and goes ahead with a story. No one gets killed, and now you’re pissed at them? Bush gets bad intel, sends over 1,000 soldiers to their death and you find every excuse in the book to explain why he would publicly go forward with sensational WMD “news”?

There are significant differences. CBS got bad intel, had lots of reasons to know it was bad, had practically everyone telling them it was bad, and ignored it.

The understanding that Saddam was involved in WMD programs was the consensus belief of every intelligence community that bothered to look into the question. Furthermore Saddam had a history of fooling international inspections regarding nuclear programs (see 1991) so the idea that he was trying to fool people now (especially since he had actively resisted allowing inspections for four years in a row) was very defensible.

You know, why hasn’t anyone investigated whether these documents were actually planted by a Karl Rove operative, as a way to make the Kerry campaign look bad? It’s very suspicious that a lot of right-wing bloggers figured out they were forgeries almost immediately after the CBS broadcast. It’s almost like they were tipped off. Rove has a long history of nasty tricks like this, including an incident in Texas where he forged documents to make his candidate’s opponent look bad.

“You know, why hasn’t anyone investigated whether these documents were actually planted by a Karl Rove operative, as a way to make the Kerry campaign look bad?”

I would be shocked if CBS hasn’t looked into it. It would be in their best interest to find out.

right wing conspiracy theories sure make boring reading. You don’t have the intel that leaders in government have. Bill Clinton and George Bush were in agreement about Iraq and what they had and where they were heading. It is not politics. Now if you are opposed to our taking the fight to the enemy, then you must under all moral, ethical and patriotic reason volunteer to fight the enemy here.

As long as they don’t start the Draft, I can live with Iraq. I was really impressed that Bush has started to scrap the 24 Month Rule so they can send the Reserves to Iraq indefinitely. Bush’s commitment to an all volunteer army is admirable and commendable. It speaks well that 60% of the Military voted for Bush last election. Their Vote is a sign of approval for any and all future policies regarding deployment, equipment and planning.

Tom,

Why is Iraq our “enemy”. You have obviously bought into the White House line that Sadaam had something to do with 9-11.

Sure, most of the industrial world thought Sadaam was seeking WMD. However, the rest of the industrial world (other than GB) wanted to take the time to insure Iraq was seeking, or had, WMD prior to invading. We, on the other hand, did indeed rush to war. I have my own ideas as to why this was our position, but the White House are the only persons with the actual answer as to why.

Regarding your statement about fighting the enemy here: well, we pretty much had a place to fight the enemy…Afghanistan. If as many troops had been placed in that country we may have already caught Bin Laden and would be receiving even more support from Pakistan (they would be very nervous with over 220K troops across their border). That’s neither here nor there. The White House Chose this path and we’re on it and probably will be on it for years to come. I’m sure our children will still be paying the bill for this mess down the road.

Yeah, the memos were fraudulent. Did anybody notice the rest of that news story? What was it about again?

There are significant differences. CBS got bad intel, had lots of reasons to know it was bad, had practically everyone telling them it was bad, and ignored it.

I don’t see the difference. By Feb 2003 nobody believed Saddam had WMD anymore and they all said so.

I find it interesting that “everyone” belived the intel from the Clinton administration about WMDs, but no one gave credence to the intel about Bin Laden.