POLITICS: CBS Fires 4 Execs Over Bush Guard Memo

CBS has fired four executives following the completion of an independent investigation of a 60 Minutes story about President Bush’s National Guard service. The story relied on memos that later turned out to be forged.



I’m not surprised by this, but I am curious as to why it took so long to do so. Regardless of the how’s and the why’s heads should have rolled as soon as the memos proved to be false. Dan Rather is also a casualty of this fiasco as well. I wonder though if Kerry had won would they have fired anybody?

Long ago I fired CBS in my house altogether. I'd "Rather not" is a good slogan. CBS has no relivance anymore.

The firings were well deserved for numerous reasons. It's not as clear cut as people think. The problem is not that these CBS news people "went after Bush". Who cares, that's what Media types do. They're always going after someone with a dragged up skeleton. It's routine. The same way I wake up in the morning and have a coffee, media people wake up in the morning and try to ruin someone's day. No shock there.

So why the firings? Well, because they damaged the entire business. If you're going to involve yourself in politics and try to impact election results, you better make it good. You'd better not leave yourself open. They did. They used stupid, pathetic, shabby forgeries that a child could have done a better job at, and they went public with it without taking care of themselves first.

When you assault someone's character you do so in a thorough manner. You don't leave yourself open for a counterassault. CBS dropped the ball. CBS couldn't handle a character assault on a political candidate because they had no patience, felt they were invincible and went forward with an unprepared, unpolished, and unresearched scam.

Am I calling the media professional liars? Well maybe. I can tell you this... they WILL report a document without authenticating it. It happens all the time. They place their bets. If it's wrong, they'll issue a correction/retraction on page 30 tomorrow but the damage is usually already done.

CBS caused this themselves. They went to the nation. They broadcast the garbage on a national TV show without being responsible enough to either authenticate the thing or cover themselves well. They did neither. A very stupid choice when deciding to insert yourself into a campaign which is precisely what they did. And they lost. And they lost credibility, and they lost reputation and they lost face. Not because they're anti-Bush, whatever, so's half the country. But because a national news source is not supposed to air full stories based on frauds that could have been printed at Kinkos.

Enquirer, Weekly World News, CBS in that order, and that's why heads rolled. Not because of who won the race but because of who lost their legitimacy.

I'm sure there was a bit of internal investigation to find out exactly who dropped the ball here. That's why it took time. Chances are, when this thing broke, smaller heads rolled first, with much of the tracks gone with them no doubt.....before it finally caught up to bigger sacrificial lambs....