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CBS Purge
144/Media Monitor
The US television network CBS, now part of the global media group Viacom, once had a strong track record in news and current affairs. But it has been tarnished over recent years. The Michael Mann film, The Insider, made in 1999, presented the conflict between investigative reporting and corporate interest when a programme on Big Tobacco was pulled from 60 Minutes in 1994.
The recent controversy around the status of documents used in a 60 Minutes programme about President Bush’s non-performance in the Texas Air National Guard, transmitted on 7 September 2004, has now led to the sacking of four senior news executives.
The circumstances and processes leading to their sacking have uncomfortable parallels with the whitewash techniques used in the Hutton Report to sacrifice the innocent and protect the guilty. Words like ‘purge’ and ‘witch-hunt’ were being used to describe the cowardly actions by CBS executives after they received a report from an ‘Independent Review Panel’ comprising Dick Thornburgh, former Attorney General to George Bush and former Associated Press chief Lou Boccardi, with help from a corporate law form. Danny Schechter of Media Channel saw them as ‘two guys who knew nothing about TV news and cared less’.
But what really happened, and who was responsible for a media controversy which was a coup for the Bush re-election campaign?
Minutes after the programme was transmitted bloggers contested the authenticity of the memos that were the basis of the story and a blogstorm engulfed CBS over the following weeks.
Cory Pein in Columbia Journalism Review (January/February 2005) points out the political stance of the bloggers: ‘One of the story’s top blogs, Rathergate.com. is registered to a firm run by Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative fundraiser. Some were fed by the conservative Media Research Center and by Creative Response Concepts, the same p.r. firm that promoted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. CRC’s executives bragged to PR Week that they helped legitimize the documents-are-fake story by supplying quotes from document experts as early as a day after the report, September 9.’
The mainstream media picked up the ‘evidence’ and ‘verification’ for the claims that the documents were forged. The outcome was CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, who presented the original story, apologised; CBS News claimed a source had misled the network on the document’s origins; and on 22 September the network announced ‘an independent review of the process by which the report was prepared and broadcast to help determine what actions need to be taken’. One other consequence was the controversy effectively froze any attempt by other journalists to investigate the story of Bush’s Guard years.
We now have the ‘independent’ report, which took nearly four months to produce, and reeks of cover-up. Mary Mapes, one of the affected staff, points out in a statement on the report: ‘It is noteworthy the panel did not conclude that these documents are false. Indeed in the end, all that the panel did conclude was that there were many red flags that counselled against going on air quickly. I never had control of the timing of any airing of a 60 Minutes segment; that has always been a decision made by my superiors. Airing that story when it did, was also a decision made by my superiors, including Andrew Hayward.’
Andrew Hayward, CBS News President, keeps his job. So does Dan Rather - he is stepping down from CBS Evening News but will still stay on 60 Minutes. Les Moonves, the CBS Chief Executive, in his statement on 10 January 2005, terminated the employment of Mary Mapes, the producer of the segment, and asked Josh Howard, Mary Murphy and Betsy West to resign. Mary Mapes is ‘shocked by the vitriolic scape-goating’ of Moonves’s statement and asserts ‘his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations - ratings rather than journalism’.
Another episode in the dishonourable tradition of corporate fat cats surviving whilst those lower down the chain are the scapegoats.
Last modified: Monday, March 14, 2005
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More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
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