CBS hires Bush political team as consultants

[Moses]

[White house directs corporations to pay Bush buddies for access]

w w w . b r o a d c a s t i n g c a b l e . c o m

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Viacom Taps GOP Bridge-Builder
By Bill McConnell -- Broadcasting & Cable, 1/10/2005 9:03:00 AM

CBS parent Viacom Inc. is working overtime to get in the good graces of the White House and the Republican-led Congress.


In the latest move, the company’s D.C. lobbying shop has hired well-connected Mehlman & Vogel as consultants.
 <br>The move gives Viacom a pair of outside guns with strong ties to both the Bush administration and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.


The firm is led by Bruce Mehlman, who was the Commerce Department’s assistant secretary for technology policy during Bush’s first term. His brother Ken ran the President’s reelection campaign. Alex Vogel is Frist’s former chief counsel.

Mehlman & Vogel’s hiring came a few weeks before CBS News President Andrew Heyward dropped in on Bush communications director Dan Bartlett to thaw chilly relations with the White House. Vogel wouldn’t say whether his firm set up the meeting.

Vogel says his firm doesn’t have any other media clients at the moment and he looks forward to working with “a great company.”

No doubt, Viacom would like Republicans to talk about the company in such glowing terms following a rough year with the GOP. Party rank-and-file made hay over the Super Bowl halftime debacle. Then came Dan Rather’s bungled story about the President’s National Guard Service.

Vogel will be trying to polish Viacom’s image in a town where people are given to saying things like, “Cable is a bit like pharmaceutical companies or Microsoft. Everybody loves the product but feels that the industry is a big and potentially dangerous player.” The speaker? Vogel’s partner, Bruce Mehlman, in 2003.



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[Moses]

www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/sns-ap-cbs-guard,0,2400975.story?coll=orl-home-headlines

CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe

By DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer

January 10, 2005, 12:38 PM EST

NEW YORK -- Four CBS News staffers were fired Monday following the release of an independent investigation that said a "myopic zeal" led to the airing of a discredited "60 Minutes Wednesday" story about President Bush's military service.

The panel's 224-page report detailed dozens of missteps, including the reliance on documents that were allegedly forged to a circle-the-wagons mentality that compounded the damage.
CBS fired Mary Mapes, producer of the Sept. 8 report; Josh Howard, executive producer of "60 Minutes Wednesday" and his top deputy Mary Murphy; and senior vice president Betsy West.
Dan Rather, who narrated the report, was faulted for "errors of credulity and overenthusiasm," but was not disciplined by top CBS executive Leslie Moonves. Rather announced in November that he was stepping down as anchorman of the "CBS Evening News," but insisted the timing had nothing to do with the investigation.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward kept his job. The panel said Heyward had explicitly urged caution before the report aired.
Moonves had appointed former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, retired president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press, to investigate what went wrong and they delivered their report last week.

"These problems were caused primarily by a myopic zeal to be the first news organization to broadcast what was believed to be a new story about President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, and the rigid and blind defense of the segment after it aired despite numerous indications of its shortcomings," the panelists concluded.

Boccardi and Thornburgh said they could find no evidence to conclude the report -- aired two months before Bush won re-election -- was politically motivated.

The report cited documents purported to be from one of Bush's commanders in the Texas Air National Guard. The documents say the commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, ordered Bush to take a medical exam and the future president did not. Killian also reportedly felt pressured to sugarcoat an evaluation of then 1st Lt. Bush.

Questions were quickly raised about the memo, with some document experts saying it appeared were written on a computer not invented at the time they were supposedly written.
Although the panel said it couldn't prove conclusively the documents were forged, it said CBS News failed to authenticate them and falsely claimed an expert had done so when all he had done was authenticate one signature.

The panel said Mapes had misled her superiors about the documents and the background of her source, retired Texas National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.

CBS News executives relied too heavily on Mapes, who only months earlier had broken the story about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and had been investigating Bush's National Guard service since 1999. Howard, who had begun supervising "60 Minutes Wednesday" in June, gave too much deference to her and Rather, the panel said.

Reached at her Dallas home Monday, Mapes said: "I haven't seen the report yet, so I won't be saying anything until I do."
Two days after the report, Heyward ordered West to review the opinions of document examiners and confidential sources who had supported the story -- but no such investigation was done.
"Had this directive been followed promptly, the panel does not believe that `60 Minutes Wednesday' would have publicly defended the segment for another 10 days," Boccardi and Thornburgh wrote.

The panel faulted Rather, and said it did not appear he had even seen the report until its broadcast. And it said CBS' apology, issued nearly two weeks after the report aired, unfairly pinned too much blame on Burkett and not enough on its own failures.
CBS News has appointed one of its executives, Linda Mason, to a newly created job of senior vice president of standards and special projects. It will be her job to thoroughly review everything about an investigative scandal before it airs.

Jeff f*ger, executive producer of "60 Minutes" on Sunday, will oversee the Wednesday broadcast as well for the rest of the TV season.

Both Moonves and the panel said it hoped the report did not have a "chilling effect" on CBS News' commitment to investigative journalism.

"By doing what needed to be done, as painful as some of these steps are, we hope to have moved decisively to set the record straight, and to turn this crisis into an opportunity to make CBS News stronger than it ever has been," Moonves said.

[Moses]

CBS' COWARDICE AND CONFLICTS BEHIND PURGE

NETWORK'S CRAVEN BACK-DOWN ON BUSH DRAFT DODGE REPORT SURE TO GET A STANDING ROVE-ATION AT WHITE HOUSE

Tuesday Jan 11, 2005
By Greg Palast
"Independent" I disagree. CBS' cowardly purge of five journalists who exposed George Bush's dodging of the Vietnam War draft was done under cover of what the network laughably called an "Independent Review Panel."

The "panel" was just two guys as qualified for the job as they are for landing the space shuttle: Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi.

Remember Dickie Thornburgh? He was on the Bush 41 Administration's payroll. His grand accomplishment as Bush's Attorney General was to whitewash the investigation of the Exxon Valdez Oil spill, letting the oil giant off the hook on big damages. Thornburgh's fat pay as counsel to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, the Washington law-and-lobbying outfit, is substantially due to his job as a Bush retainer. This is the kind of stinky conflict of interest that hardly suggests "independent." Why not just appoint Karl Rove as CBS' grand inquisitor and be done with it?

Then there's Boccardi, not exactly a prince of journalism. This is the gent who, as CEO of the Associated Press, spiked his own wire service's exposure of Oliver North and his traitorous dealings with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Legendary AP investigative reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger found their stories outing the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 stopped by their bosses. They did not know that Boccardi was on those very days deep in the midst of talks with North, participating in the conspiracy.

Today I spoke with Parry at his home in Virginia. He was sympathetic to Boccardi who at the time was trying to spring AP reporter Terry Anderson held hostage in Iran. But to do so, Boccardi joined, unwittingly, in a criminal conspiracy to trade guns for hostages. He then spiked his own news agency's investigation of it. Parry later discovered a 1986 email from North to John Poindexter in which North notes that Boccardi "is supportive of our terrop ... [ Click here for full article ]

[Moses]

State of the Union speech.... It was classic Bush. Devious and Deceptive. And effective. CBS reinforced the power of televised political theater by taking one of those totally unscientific junk journalism online polls while the speech was underway to report that many Americans who believed that Bush had no plan on Iraq now believe he has one. There apparently were no questions asked about the tooth fairy. Why does Rather seems to need to ingratiate himself to the White House this way. Its a bit late. He is being temporarily replaced by Bob Schiefer until they find a trio of younger news readers. The old CBS is history.

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[Moses]

CBS News' Boss Hired Private Eye to Source Memos, but handed in private info on producer -- nothing on memo source.