Dan Rather Not Alone In Media's Slanted Agenda
October 10, 2004

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Not long ago, editorial rooms of The New York Times were rocked by the Jason Blair scandal. Top editors resigned as a result of the deliberately falsified news fictions by Blair.

Other major newspapers, including The Washington Post, have been devastated by similar chicanery in their newsrooms.

And these events became public knowledge after public opinion surveys showed that a majority of Americans give the general media low marks for credibility. But the public's confidence in media reliability took an even bigger hit in late September when a Gallup poll found the public's trust in the press at the lowest point in 30 years.

The Gallup study results were revealed after Dan Rather's "scoop" about "documents" purporting to criticize President Bush's performance while in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War had caused the latest eggy face for the news media.

When the claims made by Rather and the authenticity of the "source" documents he had "uncovered" were challenged almost immediately by Internet bloggers, Rather and CBS News defended their story and their professionalism. But it didn't take long for the documents to be proven as fakes and to discover that a lawyer connected to the Kerry campaign had been a contact man between the disgruntled Texan who had started the story and CBS.

Red-faced after being caught in the act of broadcasting a lie, when even some of his own staff had expressed reservations about the story, Rather publicly admitted the mistake and apologized to CBS viewers. The majority of American also got most of the details from the print media and other broadcast news networks, who, like the correct police chief played by Claude Raines in the movie "Casablanca" who discover that illegal gambling is rampant in that city, expressed shock to hear that their was dishonesty and incompetence in the media.

Yes, the media professionals criticized Rather and CBS, but how many stories are wrong, not only on CBS but elsewhere, for which no apology is ever forthcoming.

And The Washington Post, The New York Times and CBS are not the only malefactors.

ABC News
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on Sept. 9 called on ABC News anchor Peter Jennings and correspondent Bill Redeker to admit the network distorted fact during a report on the end of the so-called assault weapons ban that aired on Sept. 8.

During that segment, video footage from the North Hollywood bank robbery shootout in March 1997 showed the robbers firing full-automatic arms, suggesting that this type of firearm will be legal when the ban expired at midnight Sept. 13. Those guns had been illegally modified, yet ABC News left the impression that such rifles will be available to the general public.

"Such firearms were illegal prior to the ban, and will be illegal after it sunsets, and ABC knows it," said SAF founder Alan Gottlieb. "ABC's research on this story was either incredibly poor or deliberately distorted. There is no other explanation. It's the same distorted reporting we saw in 1994, prior to the ban, in which the press faked footage in an attempt to portray ammunition from these guns as explosively lethal.

Reporter Redeker made an issue out of certain cosmetic features that were affected by the ban, specifically folding stocks and flash suppressors. He lamented that folding stocks make these rifles more "concealable" and the flash suppressor makes it harder to spot a shooter at night.

"Rather than explain the law, or note federal studies that have determined this ban, as well as other gun control laws, were ineffective in reducing crime, ABC News sensationalized, and as a result fictionalized, what this ban did and what will result from the law's sunset," Gottlieb concluded. "That's not simply irresponsible reporting. It's journalistic fraud, and ABC News, Jennings and Redeker should apologize for it."

Cam Edwards writes in the October edition of America's First Freedom magazine that The New York Times informally polled reporters at the Democratic National Convention to find that Washington, DC-based reporters favor John Kerry by a 12-to-1 margin over George Bush for election on Nov. 2.

"The question then becomes," Edwards says, "can we trust these reporters to examine the issues honestly and objectively?'Sadly, I think it's become all too obvious over the past few months that we cannot."

Edwards hosts "Cam & Company" Monday through Friday from 2-5p.m. on the Internet at: http://www.nranews.com, and is also heard at that time on SIRIUS Satellite Radio Patriot Channel 141, and then replayed on SIRIUS 142 from 6-9 a.m.

Here's just one of the stories you probably didn't see on CBS, ABC, NBC or CNN.

But The Washington Times did report on Sept. 21 that the 318,000-member Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement labor organization in the United States, has endorsed President Bush. This was the first time a presidential candidate had won the endorsement by a unanimous vote of the organization's board of directors. Under the union's bylaws a candidate must receive a two-thirds majority of the national board in order to be endorsed.

In 2000, the FOP also endorsed Bush, but it backed President Clinton in 1996.

There has also been little coverage of firefighter union and other Bush endorsements by first responders. And certainly there has been no coverage of military voter attitudes in this election.

Now that you know where most of the media stands on the election, you know how the news will be slanted.

Peter Zenger and others in the journalistic profession who have suffered for the right to report all the news without control or censorship must be spinning in their graves.