It used to be that when people thought of a journalist or "reporter," we thought of those old black-and-white movies from the '40s. A seasoned gumshoe, press credentials stuck in his fedora, someone who had seen it all and done it all to get the story and report it just the way it happened. Sadly, that guy no longer exists. Somehow, that guy has morphed into a mud-slinging, sensationalistic propagandist for whom the story being true doesn't matter, just as long as they can push their out-in-the-open agenda.
The latest example of "modern journalism" is CBS's interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. As Democrats have figured out that keeping Harris in the basement, anybody's basement, isn't working, they recently sent her out on a media blitz that included some usual friendly outlets, one of them being CBS. As RedState's own Nick Arama recently reported, Harris sat down on Monday with Bill Whitaker. For as much as CBS can be considered a liberal mainstream media outlet, in fairness, Whitaker did not throw softballs but asked pertinent, valid questions.
Not even a skillful veteran like Whitaker could fend off Harris' word salads. But CBS, in their attempt to drag Harris across the finish line, appears to have done some, well...creative editing. In fact, one Harris bag of mixed greens, an answer to a question about the Israel-Hamas conflict and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that appeared in a preview of the interview, had been completely cut out by Monday. The edits are now raising a lot of questions, and the Trump campaign has demanded that CBS release the entire unedited transcript of the interview.
I'm old, but unlike Joe Biden, I remember things, so let's take a trip down memory lane back to 2004. Let's all remember that this is not CBS' first rodeo with the "stretching" of journalistic standards. In 2004, President George W. Bush was running for reelection. In September, two months before the vote, CBS, and more specifically, Dan Rather, ran a story about Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s. The claim by CBS and Rather was, in 1968, former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes had called in some favors to get Bush assigned to that unit so he would avoid going to Vietnam. It was the documents that would confirm this that were in question. Those documents were allegedly written by Bush's former commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Killian claimed that Bush did not complete a physical, and Killian claimed he felt pressured into glossing over an evaluation.
However, Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, had a bit of a verification problem. The documents obtained by CBS and Mapes were immediately questioned. There was an issue that one of the documents contained a computer character that no typewriter used at that time would have been capable of. There were also questions about the credibility of CBS' source. CBS executives, in another attempt to verify the story, formed a panel that included former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press Chief Executive Louis Boccardi. Ultimately, the panel could not determine how the source obtained the documents, and Killian was deceased, leaving no one to verify their authenticity.
CBS at first defended the story, but Rather and Mapes were never able to verify it completely. Rather was taken off the story, and Mapes was later fired. But the best part may be that, at least as of 2015, Dan Rather still believed the story. He stated:
“You can argue that we never got to the original documents. But nobody has ever proven that they were anything other than what they were purported to be.”
No, Dan, that's not how it works. Just because someone has not said they were false doesn't make them true. Was it Rather's case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, an early variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or just his desire to be first with a bombshell? Who knows? Dan Rather retired and is now interviewing aging rock stars on cable TV.
CBS is not saying anything about this latest flap -- but former CBS reporter Catherine Herridge is. She stated that by releasing the raw transcript, “It’s about transparency and standing behind the integrity of the final edit." It's this relatively new brand of "yellow journalism" that is the reason for the rise in popularity of new and independent media outlets. Yet the mainstream media has the nerve to wonder why their viewer and readership continue to drop. It would be easy to go on about how the mainstream media has lost its way, how they have lost the "why." When it comes to CBS and the rest, we seem to keep asking when they will learn.
