Who says that a competitive marketplace encourages the best and brightest to rise to the top? Less than a month after the forged TANG memos blew up in their faces, CBS is defending a story by Richard Schlesinger on “Reviving The Draft”.
Nevermind that Schlesinger overlooked telling his audience that his star “mom on the street”, Beverly Cocco, heads up an advocacy group called People Against the Draft. To advance his piece, Schlesinger used the content of an email hoax.
Bill at INDC Journal tracked down Schlesinger, CBS spokeswoman Sandra Genelius, and producer Linda Karas, for an interview. The responses must be read to be believed.

INDC: “Probably the main concern with the story is that the e-mails that are shown in the piece are false; they’ve been debunked on various internet sites long ago …”
Schlesinger: “The fact is, they were going around. I know several people that got them, and it’s gotten people all riled up. Whether or not there’s any reality to there being a draft, is almost besides the point. Do I think there’s going to be a draft? No. But it’s an issue that people are talking about.”
[…]
Karas: “The truth of the e-mails were absolutely irrelevant to the piece, because all the story said was that people were worried. It’s a story about human beings that are afraid of the draft. We did not say that this (e- mail) was true, it’s just circulating. We are not verifying the e-mail.”

“We are not verifying the e-mail”.
What does that mean? They didn’t bother going to the trouble of fact checking and didn’t know it was a hoax? Or that they knew, and deliberately withheld that information from their audience, even though it was cited as reponsible for the “fear” they are reporting?
Is there a third explanation that I’ve overlooked, that validates this response as evidence of the thinking of intelligent, professional journalists?
There’s a long list of media observers who have accused CBS of pro-Democrat bias. There are websites – rathergate.com and ratherbiased.com – devoted to exposing it. But reading Bill’s interview, I’m no longer sure that bias is really at the root of CBS’s problems. These responses indicate something quite different is going on, for they are devoid of any cleverness or obfuscation. We saw hints of that in the defense by Dan Rather of the forged memos. “False, but true”. They actually believe that a hoax is valid basis for a news story, so long as the response to it is “genuine” or that some people believe it to be true. It’s a wonder we don’t get monthly updates from CBS based on press releases from the Flat Earth Society.
I realized this morning, that I’ve seen this sort of “logic” before – in the dog world. Dog breeders usually enter their field as rank novices, without training, accreditation or passing muster with an employer. They buy a dog (or two or three), go to a few shows, start making puppies and learn as they go. As might be expected, a few of these people have trouble getting velcro to work. They approach dog breeding with the intellectual quality of an excited moth sighting a light bulb.
When the puppies that result reflect the mediocrity any reasonably knowledgable breeder would have predicted, they rejoice in their quality. When others beg to differ, they can’t see the shortcomings, they can’t understand why their results are questioned. With beauty so conveniently located “in the eye of the beholder” they rationalize that it is the beholder who is lacking.
They don’t progress, they repeat past mistakes and if they’re stubborn enough to stick it out a few years, develop a reputation as serial losers.
This type of dog breeder is so well known, that we even have a name for them.
We call them “stupid people”.
The more explanations of this type I read from employees of CBS, the more I realize that they don’t sound like crafty politicians or spin doctors at all. They sound like the clueless twits we read on doggie email lists.
It’s not bias at all. Someone at CBS is going out of their way to hire stupid people.

“If you were a fish, Dan, what would it be?”

Update: Ratherbiased.com is down, so I’ve redirected the link to Jeff Goldstein’s save of the story
Update2: “Sugarcoat it” Memo surfaces via an uninpeachable source.

Editoral director of CBSNews.com, Dick Meyers, was a guest this afternoon on the Murray Wood Show (Rawlco Radio – 650 CKOM), explaining the decision of his network regarding the use (or rather, non-use) of beheading images on television. While explaining his own difficulty struggling with the issue, and propensity to “err in favour” of disclosure, his rationale included the fact that the images were beyond the realm of good taste and they served as propoganda.
?
I called in, and suggested that his explanation would make more sense, had the contraversy over supressing “propoganda” images of Nick Berg’s murder not been played out over the backdrop of Abu Graihb and the weeks of tasteless prison photos that amounted to nothing more but different camera angles.
(Sorry, there are no transcripts, so this is from memory).
In addition to making a weak attempt to justify the use of the prison images as part of a “developing story” , Mr. Meyers actually attempted to claim that CBS had “broken the story” on Abu Graihb.
I corrected him. I reminded Mr. Meyers that the story had been actually “broken” by the Pentagon months before it made national news, had been covered in the back pages of print media, and was pretty much ignored until months later – when the photos became available.
I don’t think he was expecting that.
He seemed a little rattled. Then, the (extended) segment ended and he had to go.
Heh. Thanks, Murray.
Added to the Beltway Traffic Jam

French photographer Gilles Nicolet sells National Geographic staged photos. The magazine doesn’t notice.

The readers do.

On pages 78-9 (photograph above), the picture caption reads that hunters are carrying “tusks taken from an elephant found dead in the bush.” Soon after the article was published, several readers pointed out that there are faint but unmistakable numbers on the tusk on page 78 which we failed to notice before publishing the story. We now know that the tusks belong to the Tanzania Department of Wildlife. When we asked photographer Gilles Nicolet to explain, he admitted that he himself had supplied the tusks to the hunters after borrowing them from local wildlife authorities.
This was in direct contrast to what Nicolet had repeatedly assured us when we were preparing the story. As part of our rigorous internal system of checks and balances, we routinely obtain independent verification of the circumstances in which a photograph is made. In very few instances, we are unable to do so. This story was one of those cases, and we published it knowing that we were relying heavily on Nicolet’s accounts.
In light of his disturbing admission about the tusks, we immediately launched an investigation into the other photographs in the story and determined that the two on page 85 which the caption identifies as showing a successful hunter removing his spear from an elephant and then removing the tusks were actually made several years earlier and are not of the Barabaig. (See photographs below.)

And National Geographic editor-in-chief William L. Allen does the right thing.

By publishing this story, we failed our readers. We are currently reviewing our internal procedures to do our best to ensure that this type of mistake does not happen again. In addition, we are re-examining Nicolet’s only previous story for National Geographic (“Hunting the Mighty Python,” May 1997); to date it appears that all of the pictures and accompanying captions are accurate.
We apologize to our readers.

Of course, here the stakes weren’t as high. The elephant story wasn’t written to help get a donkey elected.

The Sept. 13-15 poll — conducted after the CBS News report was questioned but before the network issued a formal apology — found that just 44% of Americans express confidence in the media’s ability to report news stories accurately and fairly (9% say “a great deal” and 35% “a fair amount”). This is a significant drop from one year ago, when 54% of Americans expressed a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media. The latest result is particularly striking because this figure had previously been very stable — fluctuating only between 51% and 55% from 1997-2003.

Hat Tip – Jeff Jarvis