According to Instapundit, CBS is scheduled to release a statement “clarifying” its fake documents story.
Instapundit notes wryly: “Word is that they’ll defiantly unveil this documentary support for their case.”
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
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LOL LOL LOL
Okay, I am out of the loop.
What is all this CBS, Dan Rather, George Bush, forgeries, parodies, etc. all about?
Here’s the short story: CBS News ran a piece on 60 Minutes that claimed the discovery of several memos from the time when Pres. Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s. These memos suggested that he refused a direct order to take a physical. The Kerry campaign (who may have given the memos to CBS) hopped on this to try to raise a stink about what such a refusal 30 years ago might say about Pres. Bush’s fitness as commander in chief today. CBS’s Dan Rather, who aired the story, hopped on that bandwagon, too.
But then CBS posted .pdfs of the the memos to the Web and it was instantly obvious that the key memo was not only a fake, it was a clumsy, ludicrous fake that could not possibly have been produced on standard office equipment in the 1970s.
In fact, it appears to have been produced in Microsoft Word, as shown in this animation.
Faced with an accumulating mountain of evidence that the documents were fake, Dan Rather dug in his heels and refused to admit he had been hoaxed. He refused to answer the most important points raised by blogosphere analysts of the memos and trotted out some “experts” (who turned out to be not so expert) to endorse the authenticity of the documents.
The experts then turned around, said that they could not authenticate the documents or that what they said had been misrepresented. Other experts have since come forward and said that they warned CBS the documents were fake and that CBS ignored their warnings and went ahead with the story anyway.
CBS News now has its reputation in tatters as the evidence has mounted that it ran with the story in a partisan political ploy to try to help the Kerry campaign. It has refused to name or even describe in general terms its source for the documents, and some in CBS have hinted that the source may be the Kerry campaign or Democratic operatives closely connected with it.
The key blogs to get up to date on all this are:
Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, Rather Biased, Power Line Blog, and Kerry Spot.
For a good column describing the scandal, see here.
Oh, yeah, and as a result of all this, pajamas have now become the official uniform for bloggers everywhere.
That explains a lot.
Thanks.
As long as news is reported by human beings, there will be some bias in it. Hopefully less than more, but surely some.
CBS has the right to be liberally baised. Fine.
But in Memogate, they IGNORED credible evidence that ran counter to their bias, and that makes them PARTISANS.
I stopped watching Big 3 news years ago, and I mean, years ago.