Reply #85: Excuse me, but CBS backed Rather's report and employed four....

[Media_Lies_Daily]

...different lawyers to ensure that the facts checked out. They're not going to fire Rather because Rather will break their balls in court. You can bet your bottom dollar that Rather understands the phrase "CYA documentation"...and you can also bet that Rather knows where a lot of bodies are buried.

I will say that you seem to have betrayed a great deal of personal animosity toward Rather...what seems to be the major issue with you and Dan?

And no, CBS's credibility was ruined quite some time ago by their association with CIA operations to include Operation Mockingbird. Unlike you, I will actually supply a link so that you can actually read what I'm telling you:

Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
<http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html>

Excerpt:

Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.

Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.
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And here's another article...

A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass Media
<http://www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm>

Excerpt:

CBS: CIA Broadcasting System?
Bernstein asserts that a good relationship between former CIA director Allen Dulles and former CBS president William Paley (CFR) made the network the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. "Over the years," Bernstein writes, "the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communications between the Washington bureau chief and the agency; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents... to be routinely monitored by the CIA."

Paley chose Sig Mickelson (CFR), president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961, as his liaison with the CIA. Mickelson (who went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) recalls complaining about having to use a pay phone to contact the CIA, and later installing a private line that bypassed the CBS switchboard for this purpose. A CBS investigation of his files revealed that he was involved in passing on CBS film and outtakes to CIA officials in exchange for payment and that he regularly forwarded copies of CBS' internal newsletter to his CIA handlers. The same investigation revealed that two CBS employees -- stringer Austin Goodrich and Frank Kearns, a network reporter from 1958-1971 -- were undercover CIA operatives.

Mickelson has discussed his CIA activities with Bernstein and others. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," he has recalled. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and the film arrangements. I assumed that this was the normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating -- though the Goodrich matter was compromising."

Mickelson's successor Richard Salant says he continued some of these practices when he took the CBS helm. "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes," he explains. "This went on for a number of years -- into the Seventies."