"The CBS Mess" - Commentary by Tony Seton

The CBS Mess

All the hullabaloo about the CBS screw-up on the Bush-didn’t-serve memos causes a healthy head to shake. First because the Rather folks should do such a bad job of fact-checking and second that everyone is focused on the memos and not on the facts. This isn’t news; it isn’t new.

CBS, like ABC and NBC have done an atrocious job of reporting the news for the past twenty-plus years. Since Cronkite left the anchor chair, we haven’t had a decent network newscast in this country, and worse, they’ve gotten worse. During the Reagan years the anchors bent over backwards to the charges that the media were liberal and they haven’t stood up since.

The problem with their being cowed is that the three networks stopped doing journalism. No wonder their ratings went into the toilet. They’ve got half the number watching as they did in the good ole days and mostly those who are still in front of the set are the Geritol crowd. This is sorta all right with the networks because while the audience is smaller, they mostly have money. And undemanding standards for their news.

The bigger problem is that the masses don’t have a good source of news, and being uninformed has led us to where we are today. Any rational person looking at the Bush record would be askance. Those who do look are. The reason why the rest of the world would vote for Kerry by forty points is because they watch real news and know, tragically, what’s going on. It’s not personal; they’re scared. If we were informed, we’d be scared too.

Had CBS been practicing journalism for the past two decades, they probably wouldn’t have been snookered. But the fact is that the substance of their information was dead on, and CBS still lacks the substance to bring that point home.

The truth is that Bush went AWOL for at least two years because he was too drunk or drugged out to pass his flight physical. So the real bottom line is that the network news operations continue to fail our country to the point of treason.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.