Ra^ther Sorry

But Fails to Challenge "The Thrust of the Charges" Against Him

An apology isn't enough. By his own repeatedly-declared standard, the failure to challenge the "thrusts" and "essences" of charges constitutes evidence of the charges' accuracy.

RatherBiased.com lists 20 journalistic breaches CBS News must admit to and apologize for. As that site is currently down, probably because it's being hammered by traffic, I hope they won't mind my reposting their 20 Journalistic Crimes Committed By 60 Minutes.

We hope, but are not expecting, that the network will also apologize for the following:

1. Failing to use the best document experts it could find,

2. Hiring a signature expert to look at a copied document when he himself said earlier that doing such a thing was foolish,

3. Ignoring and lying about the testimony of those it did hire,

4. Failing to interview Marian Knox as well as the others listed above,

5. Not interviewing anyone directly connected with Lt. Col Killian,

6. Not informing viewers that Staudt had retired a year-and-a-half before the time he was supposedly trying to help "sugarcoat" Bush's record,

7. Failing to inform viewers that not a single verified document signed by Killian or his fellow officers during the time period used the typographical techniques used in the CBS Memos,

8. Not mentioning Ben Barnes's partisan background enough,

9. Not disclosing the 30-year friendship of the two Texas Democrats Barnes and Rather,

10. Failing to even know who producer Mary Mapes's document source was before the broadcast,

11. Dishonestly impugning the motives of critics,

12. Using its news broadcasts to defend a bad report instead of examining how it could be wrong,

13. Never once featuring a single document expert on the air who doubted CBS's claims,

14. Putting total non-experts on the air to spin the preferred "authentic" line even though CBS would not allow them to see its documents,

15. Not mentioning that Killian never kept notes and hated to type,

16. Failing to provide the public with copies of the documents as close as possible to the ones CBS obtained,

17. Not finding out if the office in which Killian worked even had a typewriter capable of duplicating most of the complex formatting used in the CBS documents (it did not),

18. Using the testimony of a vehemently anti-Bush author to prove its case and simply referring to him as an author who "wrote two books on the subject,"

19. Failing to inform viewers that its document source was someone who hated George Bush,

20. Not telling viewers that one of its key (if not the key) sources was a man known to be mentally unstable and one who has lodged false
accusations against Bush for years.

RatherBiased.com has a lot more than that, too, and you go on over the moment their servers are back.

So, Mr. Rather: Will you respond to the "questions" raised by these documents?