What Did Rather Know,

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What Did Rather Know, and When Did He Know It?

Jay Bryant

September 11, 2004

La Femme Kerry said the other day that anyone who did not support her husband's health care plan was an "idiot," which if true means they are the same cohort of folks who still believe the CBS documents on President Bush's service record are genuine.

As of this writing, the network is said to be investigating the situation. Of course, this is not a real investigation, in the police sense. CBS leaves that sort of thing to fiction, on its CSI programs, for example. What they're investigating is how to minimize the public relations damage.

They have only two choices: they must either be the duper or the dupee. In other words, either someone at CBS was in on the fraud, or they were defrauded by the con artist who passed off the forgeries as genuine.

What did Dan Rather know, and when did he know it?

For someone like Sandy Berger, it is always better to claim sloppiness than evil intent, but for a news organization, the issue is not nearly as clear. It is the job of an organization like CBS to sort out the real from the phony. If they don't do that, what earthly good are they?

In other words, it may be better, PR-wise, for them to blame the mess on overzealous producers than to admit that someone on the outside sold them a bill of goods.

Regardless, the culpability in this case goes only so high up the executive food chain. CBS is owned by Viacom International, Inc., a corporate giant that also owns such entities as Blockbuster, Paramount and Simon and Schuster. The Chairman and CEO is a man named Sumner M. Redstone, a Harvard-educated lawyer who ran a film distribution company called National Amusements, a closely-held company which acquired Viacom, then only a cable TV company, in 1987.

It would appear from his biography, that Mr. Redstone is a Democrat, but I'll bet my portfolio he wasn't part of the Bush-Guard scam. And I'll further bet he's p---ed off something fierce.

So that's lesson #1 here. The newsies like to complain about the giant corporate ownership that has taken over their business, forcing them – in their own minds at least – to surrender some of their independence. But it is "corporate" that is coming down on them like a ton of bricks right now, because they really and truly do need adult supervision.

If lesson #1 is the top-down lesson, lesson #2 is strictly bottom-up.

For decades, I have wondered why, if the three network news organizations were truly in competition with one another, they didn't act like they were. Eventually, I decided my sense of competition had been warped because of having learned it in the political game.

In politics, a major part of the competition is exposing your opponent's miscues. But that never seems to happen in the news business. Why, I often asked myself, don't the networks spend some investigative effort on one another, debunking the others' stories whenever possible? Wouldn't that be in the public interest, convenience and necessity? But they never do. Night after night, they simply report on the same news, with virtually the same lineup of stories, and it's been like that since the very beginning.

The only reasonable explanation is that none of the organizations wants to call the kettle black, for fear that they are equally pot-worthy. I think that's pretty close to the definition of what might be termed oligarchic monopolistic behavior, where a few companies have divvied up the market and are all getting fat and happy and don't want to risk anything.

So lesson #2 is that "them days is gone forever," because the market for news has uncontrollable players now. In other words, the Internet has arrived. Thank you, Al Gore.

The expose of CBS's phony documents was done by the blogosphere, that incredibly viral part of the Internet that can process information with lightning speed and disseminate it in ways that cause it to expand exponentially. Within a few hours, the bloggers had found the document experts who could authoritatively show the likelihood of Col. Killian's having typed those memos in 1972 was approximately equal to the likelihood that Plato wore a wristwatch.

When the network newsies aren't complaining about Corporate America having intruded into their space, they complain about how the "unreliable" Internet has intruded into their audience, and is deluding the populace with inaccuracies.

To use Mr. Kerry's favorite word, they're "wrong" on both counts.

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