Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
Wednesday, September 15, 2004 And the Beating Goes On I can't recall which blogger I was reading, but one point he made about RatherGate was that like the Stephen Glass hoaxes at The New Republic, this may prompt people going back to see what other stories Rather and CBS cooked. Well, yesterdy I read an account of how CBS did some story on a Viet Nam Vet in prison for armed robbery who told lurid tales of his traumas from war. The publicity got him pardoned (or paroled). Except, of course, the guy never was in Viet Nam. Now we have a great story from NRO how Rather and his crew cooked another story on criminal, addicted, suicidal Viet Nam vets, except none of it was really true. They got away with all of this even when confronted with the facts by actual Viet Nam vets and others. They stonewalled and insisted they were accurate. There was no internet then, and few organs that had enough strength to break through the MSM barricades. As Burkett notes, the records of all of these vets were easily checkable through Freedom of Information Act requests of their military records — something Rather and his producers simply didn't bother to do. They accepted at face value the lurid tales of atrocities committed in Vietnam and the stories of criminal behavior, drug addiction, and despair at home. The strategy worked before, but it can't now, and they don't know what to do. Bernie Goldberg needs to wite a new book - Cooking up Frauds at CBS. posted by Mark Butterworth | 11:51 AM | |
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