It’s mentioned near the end of this
DEVASTATING CRITIQUE OF THE CBS INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION REPORT.
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."
View all posts by Jimmy Akin
Long live the new media!
I am absolutely amazed at how upset you all are at CBS’ behavior.
Where, anywhere, does it say that a media organization cannot have a political bias?
Of course they have political biases. That’s why the First Amendment to the Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law. . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . .”
Is this a surprise? Then you all must have flunked civics!
And these organizations are profit making organizatins. They won’t admit to bias if they believe that such admission might hurt their profit margin. Is there something illegal about that?
Fabricating fraudulent documents in an effort to bring down your government during a time of war isn’t bias, it’s treason.
I don’t think it’s too much to expect the press to refrain from providing aid, comfort and assistance to the enemy.
If John Kerry had won in 2004 and been up for reelection in 2008, does anything Mary Mapes would have spent 4 years trying to find out whether Kerry was really in Cambodia? The idea that there is no bias here is a joke.
I meant to say “does anyone think Mary Mapes [or Rather] would have spent 4 years . . .”
Ray from Minn:
The issues here are twofold:
(1) CBS and the other MSM *clearly* have biases but are in denial about that fact. If they admitted it then that part of the issue would go away. They’d simply say that they were liberal partisans and thus their news consumers would be on guard to filter out the admitted liberal bias.
(2) Even if you admit your bias, that does not allow one to violate the slew of journalistic ethics standards that were chucked out the window in this story. If you have document examiners telling you that they can’t authenticate documents then you don’t present them as authenticated. In fact, you don’t run them at all. CBS did both.
BillyHW: This wouldn’t be treason under U.S. law.
According to the U.S. Constitution, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort” (Art. III, Sec. 3, Cl. 1).
Simply trying to get one administration to lose a popular election in favor of another is not treason. It’s part of the political process. In fact, it’s what both parties are trying to do to the other each time there’s an election.
Where this runs afoul of U.S. law is that it appears to violate U.S. election law (you can’t knowingly lie about a candidate in this fashion, and whoever forged the documents did) and it may involve the falsification of government documents, depending on whether the relevant Killian memos are to be construed as government documents (some have claimed they were from his private files).
Whoever did this needs to go to jail, pronto, lest others try such malefaction in the future.
For me, the real smoking gun is the expert they called in on the memos.
Peter Tytell concluded that the documents were not authentic. The report concludes that he might not have been familiar with all the possibilities. Did they call in any other experts to verify that?
I would grant you that the election laws might be a way that you might be able to prosecute a media organization.
But the Constitution is pretty clear that “Congress shall make no laws” in this regard and the Supreme Court has been reluctant to make inroads on that restriction. Politicians are generally considered fair game for criticism.
If the Supreme Court had the slightest reluctance to make inroads on freedom of speech, campaign finance “reform” would be in the trash can where it belongs. They may be reluctant here, but that’s merely partisanship.