In a ridiculous segment, The Newshour last night featured Terence Smith, a former CBS employee, discussing Dan Rather's forgeries with Susan Tifft, a press aide for the 1980 Democratic National Convention and speechwriter for the Carter-Mondale campaign and Ken Auletta, a liberal writer for The New Yorker who claims that PBS is right-wing. The introductory taped "package" actually altered the typography and format of CBS's forged memos, displaying computer-generated documents different from the ones on the CBS website. So misleading, so transparently dishonest, one had to laugh--the producers perhaps realized that showing the actual documents, as they appeared on sites like Powerlineblog.com or LittleGreenFootballs would illustrate that they are obvious fakes.
The discussion was as ludicrous as the backgrounder. In response to Smith's softball questions, Auletta and Tifft soft-peddled the CBS fraud, clinging to a "Fake but Accurate" line. For example, Auletta's explanation: "Sometimes you race too fast. You don't pin your facts down."
But according to The Wall Street Journal, CBS was working on this story for several years, and had contacted multiple document experts.
Thus, Auletta's explantation is false. Yet, Smith didn't question it, even though as a CBS News veteran, he ought to know better. All he did was go to Tifft, the former paid Democratic party operative, who supported Auletta's line: "I think it's important to think about the atmosphere in which this occurred, which is obviously very partisan atmosphere, but as Ken said, there really has been a race and rush on this story."
So, instead of a balanced debate between two sides, The Newshour offered rationalizations and excuses from partisans on the side of Dan Rather and CBS. It was simply laughable, and can't be taken seriously. A fraud,itself--transparently not balanced, not objective, and not true.
To save his own reputation, and that of his program, maybe Jim Lehrer might invite one of the pajama-clad bloggers on the show to talk about how he discovered the fakes, instead of CBS apologists and political operatives? Or if that is a bridge too far, an articulate commentator who knows something about the internet side of the story, like Andrew Sullivan or Glenn Reynolds?
Until something like that happens, PBS's Newshour reputation is damaged goods, victim of self-inflicted wounds.
