CBS flap-----Rove plan to destroy Network News?

[spanone]

Think about it. Cable news is very compliant. They tow the party line at every given chance. The only question marks are the networks where millions of Americans receive their daily news. You know cousin Karl would love to discredit the networks especially Dan Rather since he has refused to kiss the bush* ring. I put nothing past the Rove-Meister.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Say it after me

if the Democrats retake power can you say Fairness Doctrine?

The media will be forced to confrom to journalistic standards

You are right, the REPUBLICANS do not want to loose control
of their noise machine

[GreenPartyVoter]

9. We can only hope that Kerry intends to restore the fairness doctrine.

[Junkdrawer]

2. Could it be there are more stories in the 60 Minutes pipeline...

The Rove wants discredited? :shrug:

[Cocoa]

3. this campaign started with Nixon

read David Brock's "The Republican Noise Machine".

William Safire was part of it back then, and Pat Buchanan. Aimed at ending the power of the news media, especially the network anchors.

[shockingelk]

4. Are people starting to agree with ...

... those of us who were open to the possibility the docs could have been forgeries and furthermore could have been forged by Karl Rove as easily as anyone else?

[hackwriter]

5. Network news has been plenty compliant

I don't think that's it at all; I do think it's a Rove operation to discredit CBS News. The Bush family has hated Dan Rather for years, and the feeling is mutual. Keep in mind also that Viacom head Sumner Redstone is a Kerry man.

I lost all faith in Dan Rather when he went along with the rah-rah chorus during the war. The stupid thing about what Rove did is that he won this particular battle years ago.

[JHB]

6. Read this: "Anatomy of a Rove Dirty Trick"

From the blog The Left Coaster, entitled "Anatomy of a Rove Dirty Trick"

Karl Rove is the man behind George W Bush's Presidency. According to William Slater, co-author of Bush's Brain, Rove realized back in 1990 that he could make Bush President, first by getting him elected governor. And so he has. Karl Rove would make his mentor, Lee Atwater, proud. Figuring out how to destroy your enemy while neutralizing his charge without leaving any traces is a Rove speciality. Yet, as all good detectives know, sometimes you find the criminal by matching the MO (modus operandi) of the crime.

Rove's MO is all over the Killian memo controversy that threatens to take down Dan Rather.

During Bush's first run against Ann Richards, Rove knew that he needed to immunize Bush against the charge of being too aggressive and unfair when going after Ann Richards. So what he did was to create an ad where Bush declared, "My opponent attacked me personally." But get this, the ad was made and distributed to TV stations around Texas before any such accusation was made. Then the campaign used numerous taunts, including a whispering campaign that asserted Ann Richards was gay or too gay friendly to encourage her to pop off against Bush. As soon as she did, the previously prepared ad was shown all over Texas and Bush was seen as the innocent victim of an unfair attack by his opponent.

Then in the 2000 election, Rove was behind the destruction of J.H. Hatfield, the author of the book, Fortunate Son, which reported about Bush's use of cocaine when he was younger. As Mike Burke reports, the method was to provide damaging information about Bush's past to someone who could be then discredited.

In 1999, St. Martin's Press published a critical biography of Bush titled "Fortunate Son". The book quoted an unnamed "high-ranking advisor to Bush," who revealed Bush's 1972 drug bust. The source told author J.H. Hatfield, Bush "was ordered by a Texas judge to perform community service in exchange for expunging his record showing illicit drug use."

Hatfield later revealed that his source was none other than Karl Rove. That might seem ridiculous, considering Rove's lifelong loyalty to the Bushes and the fact that he now has an office adjacent to Bush's in the White House. But leaking the story to Hatfield essentially discredited the story and sent it into the annals of conspiracy theory. Soon after the book was published and just as St. Martin's was preparing a high profile launching of the book, the "Dallas Morning News" ran a story revealing that Hatfield was a felon who had served time in jail. In response, St. Martin's pulled the book."
----more------
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/002815.html#more

[DemBones DemBones]

7. More about the Rovian nature of the operation:

"John Roberts, the network's White House correspondent, called to report he'd just completed an on-camera interview with Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Bartlett, it appeared, had no quarrel with the authenticity of the documents. That was the turning point."

"If we had gotten back from the White House any kind of red flag, raised eyebrow, anything that said, 'Are you sure about this stuff?' we would have gone back to square one," Josh Howard, the program's executive producer, told the Los Angeles Times in an interview Friday. "The White House said they were authentic, and that carried a lot of weight with us."

"So Sixty Minutes II went with the story using these documents. The White House released a copy of those documents to the media and Scott McClellan affirmed that the White House believed in the authenticity of those documents."

"Yet, only hours later, an anonymous blogger known as Buckhead posted at freerepublic.com that the documents were forgeries and said "this should be pursued aggressively". And so it was. And the right-wing pack of hounds was off baying for Dan Rather's blood."

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/002815.html#more


Short version: the White House (through Dan Bartlett) vetted the CBS documents as authentic. CBS aired the story. Then Buckhead at FR raised the questions. Buckhead, though, is not an expert on typography but a Republican operative. Who fed Buckhead the info to use against CBS?

Lost in the shuffle: the story. The story that the memos told, that Bush* was AWOL, refused a flight physical, just basically quit the Guard before his commitment was fulfilled, and was allowed to get away with it.

[Avalux]

8. Makes sense

and Fox News will be anointed the first and foremost news source for the country. They have the highest ratings among cable news; the competition is CBS news, their liberal arch enemy. If CBS loses it's credibility and gets knocked down (taking NBC and ABC with it), Fox becomes Pravda.