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Memogate: the real story


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Shortly after the report about Bush's National Guard service aired on 60 Minutes (9/8/04), right-wing commentators and bloggers claimed that the documents supporting the CBS report were fraudulent and pointed to the episode as evidence of "liberal media" bias.

In fact, the CBS review, headed by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh (an appointee of Bush's father) and former Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, was not able to state conclusively whether the documents were forgeries or not. The report also found no evidence that political bias was a factor in the network's journalism.

...

The hours of coverage of the Rather episode managed to ignore what should have been the central question: Did George W. Bush, in reality, properly fulfill his National Guard requirements?

But wait: what about the false claims of Iraqi WMD the media trumpeted? Surely heads rolled for that?

The New York Times, for example, published numerous allegations about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that turned out to be false-- such as one source's claim that "all of Iraq is one large storage facility" for WMD (9/8/02). Those stories, many of which were splashed on the paper's front page, did a great deal to sell the White House's bogus case for war against Iraq.

While the Times has admitted (5/26/04) that some of its WMD reporting was "insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged," the reporter most responsible for those stories, Judith Miller, was never sanctioned by the Times-- and indeed still continues to report on Iraq for the paper. Ironically, after MSNBC's Hardball finished its discussion of CBS and journalistic responsibility on January 10, the show turned to a discussion of Iraq featuring... Judith Miller.

Selective punishment shows media's true bias

The Scorecard.

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