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Kerry Spot [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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RATHERGATE DEVELOPMENT: CBS MEETING WHITE HOUSE?
News from Broadcasting and Cable, via Scylla & Charybdis:
According to a Broadcasting & Cable source in Washington, D.C., CBS News president Andrew Heyward, along with Washington bureau chief Janet Leissner, recently met with White House communications director Dan Bartlett, in part to repair chilly relations with the Bush administration.
CBS News’ popularity at the White House—never high to begin with—plunged further in the wake of Dan Rather’s discredited 60 Minutes story on George Bush’s National Guard service.
An incentive for making nice is the impending report from the two-member panel investigating CBS's use of now-infamous documents for the 60 Minutes piece. Heyward was “working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,” our source says, “and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.” CBS declined to comment.
Scylla & Charybdis writes, "My guess is that the Thornburgh report has been completed."
If this report is accurate, we can conclude:
* Andrew Heyward is not stepping down or getting the axe.
* The report does not conclude he was responsible for CBS' refusal to issue a prompt correction.
* CBS feels the need to reach out to the White House. Is this because the report paints a picture of relentless anti-Bush hostility in the news offices, and Heyward feels the need to demonstrate that era is over?
Or is this because the report is mild in its criticism, reads like a whitewash, and Heyward feels the need to head off an angry response from the White House?
We will know eventually, hopefully before 2006. "Weeks, not months," etc.
UPDATE: Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, but left-of-center blogger Atrios cites this meeting as evidence that the media isn't liberal, but is conservative. He points out that CBS has "been wonderfully 'fair and balanced' recently, with John Roberts reading Bush adminstration press releases about Social Security and calling it 'news.'"
To paraphrase Sean Connery in Rising Sun, "But of course they are."
[Posted 01/03 10:07 AM]
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