I'd Rather Not
Yeah, I know it's a lame pun. So you go write a Dan Rather headline that doesn't have one in it. I get to write editorials again for a while since the boss is on vacation. Here's one:
Leave it to Andy Rooney, the 85-year-old curmudgeon emeritus of “60 Minutes,” to say it out loud: “The people on the front lines got fired while the people most instrumental in getting the broadcast on escaped.”
The outside investigation is in. CBS News made mistakes in its September “60 Minutes Wednesday” broadcast about President Bush’s National Guard service, and now four heads are on a platter. Producer Mary Mapes was fired outright, and resignations were requested from a senior vice president and two producers.
Non-plattered heads include lame-duck anchor Dan Rather and CBS News chief Andrew Heyward. They kept their jobs. This, despite the detailing, in a report by former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, former chief executive of the Associated Press, of many major lapses in judgment by Heyward and Rather.
Mapes, defending herself in the wake of the firing, wrote, “Airing this story when it did, was also a decision made by my superiors, including Andrew Heyward. If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me. Those superiors also made the decision to give the White House little time to consider or respond to the Killian documents.”
At 224 pages plus appendices and exhibits, the report offers exhaustive detail. But in this case, the devil isn’t in the details. The report leaves major issues unaddressed:
The last two questions merge. Those who are concerned that such a bias exists have been clamoring to know whether CBS colluded with the Kerry campaign. Although it cites an “appearance of conflict of interest” and says the story “could have been perceived as a news organization’s assisting a campaign as opposed to reporting on a story,” the report goes no further.
The report asserts that the network’s blunder was caused not by political bias, but by competitive zeal. Yet both motivations can co-exist, and they can feed off one another.
The panel was told to keep the focus on the one program where the report aired. It didn’t address CBS News as an institution. But you can’t isolate one program from the body of CBS News. Or, perhaps, from the entire business of TV network news. Network news is bleeding. According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than half the public (42 percent) now says it regularly watches one of the three nightly network broadcasts — down from 60 percent in 1993.
“We have no juice,” a production staff member at CBS said in the wake of the report. “We’re a dying business, and this didn’t help us. Some people feel like CBS News could be out of business in five years.”
The networks are dinosaurs of the '60s. News and entertainment now are on-demand commodities. Thanks to TiVo, all-news networks, the Web and satellite dishes, you can watch the same news read by blow-dried, dessicated talking heads, or by a computer-generated character or by a stripper in Bulgaria. Who needs an anchor? Anchors just hold things in place, or drag them down.
Leave it to Andy Rooney, the 85-year-old curmudgeon emeritus of “60 Minutes,” to say it out loud: “The people on the front lines got fired while the people most instrumental in getting the broadcast on escaped.”
The outside investigation is in. CBS News made mistakes in its September “60 Minutes Wednesday” broadcast about President Bush’s National Guard service, and now four heads are on a platter. Producer Mary Mapes was fired outright, and resignations were requested from a senior vice president and two producers.
Non-plattered heads include lame-duck anchor Dan Rather and CBS News chief Andrew Heyward. They kept their jobs. This, despite the detailing, in a report by former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, former chief executive of the Associated Press, of many major lapses in judgment by Heyward and Rather.
Mapes, defending herself in the wake of the firing, wrote, “Airing this story when it did, was also a decision made by my superiors, including Andrew Heyward. If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me. Those superiors also made the decision to give the White House little time to consider or respond to the Killian documents.”
At 224 pages plus appendices and exhibits, the report offers exhaustive detail. But in this case, the devil isn’t in the details. The report leaves major issues unaddressed:
- Are the Bush documents legitimate?
- Where did they come from?
- Is there a political bias at CBS News?
The last two questions merge. Those who are concerned that such a bias exists have been clamoring to know whether CBS colluded with the Kerry campaign. Although it cites an “appearance of conflict of interest” and says the story “could have been perceived as a news organization’s assisting a campaign as opposed to reporting on a story,” the report goes no further.
The report asserts that the network’s blunder was caused not by political bias, but by competitive zeal. Yet both motivations can co-exist, and they can feed off one another.
The panel was told to keep the focus on the one program where the report aired. It didn’t address CBS News as an institution. But you can’t isolate one program from the body of CBS News. Or, perhaps, from the entire business of TV network news. Network news is bleeding. According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than half the public (42 percent) now says it regularly watches one of the three nightly network broadcasts — down from 60 percent in 1993.
“We have no juice,” a production staff member at CBS said in the wake of the report. “We’re a dying business, and this didn’t help us. Some people feel like CBS News could be out of business in five years.”
The networks are dinosaurs of the '60s. News and entertainment now are on-demand commodities. Thanks to TiVo, all-news networks, the Web and satellite dishes, you can watch the same news read by blow-dried, dessicated talking heads, or by a computer-generated character or by a stripper in Bulgaria. Who needs an anchor? Anchors just hold things in place, or drag them down.
