Entire Article:
http://www.mackinac.org/article.asp?ID=6836
VERY INTERESTING ARTICLE
The litany of questionable professionalism and possible bias goes on and on. CBS News interviewed Lt. Col. Killian's son and widow, both of whom disputed the veracity of the memos, but CBS chose not to air their views in its story. CBS claims that it was told by its source that the memos came from the Lt. Col.'s personal files, but both his widow and son deny that he typed or kept personal files.
Though Lt. Col. Killian's secretary at the time, Marian Carr Knox, is still living, CBS elected not to interview her for the story. On Tuesday, September 14th, The Dallas Morning News did.
"These are not real," Mrs. Knox told The Morning News, pointing to numerous "telltale signs of forgery," including the fact that the typeface did not match either variety of typewriter in use at the time in her National Guard office. "They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him," she explained.
Mrs. Knox cannot be mistaken for a Bush supporter. She told reporters that she believed the president is "unfit for office" and that he was "selected, not elected." Most intriguingly, she also said that despite their being forgeries, she believed the documents "accurately reflect the viewpoints of Lt. Col. Killian." (To be fair to President Bush, it should be noted that according to the Washington Times, "Defense Department records show that in 1973 Col. Killian praised Mr. Bush's performance and approved his honorable discharge.")
The irony is compelling. If CBS had listened to its expert advisors and regarded the memos skeptically, it might well have sought out further expert testimony and Mrs. Knox's views. It could then have run the blockbuster story that a forger was apparently trying to skew a presidential election, while still being able to quote Mrs. Knox on Lt. Col. Killian's ostensibly critical views of then-1st Lt. Bush. Even if they had allowed their bias to get the best of them and omitted the fact that Killian is known to have praised Bush, hardly anyone in the major media would have batted an eyelash.
But CBS didn't choose this path.
Before these most recent revelations, it might well have seemed that Dan Rather and CBS News were guilty only of the relatively common journalistic crime of insufficiently researching a story that they wanted to believe. Today, that interpretation has collapsed. The 60 Minutes team is now alleged to have known that the memos had been challenged by their own experts and by Lt. Col. Killian's family, and it appears that "60 Minutes" deliberately chose not to make the public aware of these objections.
Partisan bias appears to have so deeply infected one of the nation's established news organizations that it has rotted from the inside. This will drive more and more people to seek out confirmation of "old media" stories in the open fora of the Internet, where the news is mercilessly, instantaneously and endlessly scrutinized by thousands of critics — all vying with one another to offer the most current, incisive, well-constructed analysis.
The era in which old media could publish only the news they saw fit to print is over. And we are left to wonder, what lies slipped quietly past us before the birth of Internet blogs?