Concerned about what he saw as imbalance in the newspaper, reader Dick DeArmond of the Villages wrote last week, “To use Dan Rather and CBS as a basis, why is the Orlando Sentinel any different?”
He referred, of course, to the release Monday of an independent panel’s harshly critical report about Rather’s broadcast last September questioning George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war.
The broadcast later was shown to have relied on forged documents.
No wonder DeArmond looks suspiciously at the news he receives. If you get spoiled food at the grocery store, you squeeze the produce before putting it into your basket. The CBS incident, however, wasn’t the only example of rotten journalism recently.
The previous Friday, USA Today reported that Armstrong Williams, a prominent commentator and columnist, had accepted $240,000 from the United States Department of Education to build support among black families for the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law.
He said he took the taxpayers’ money to convince them of the virtues of NCLB “because it’s something I believe in.”
You might ask, I suppose, “If he believed in it, why did anyone have to pay him to support it?”
Well, why not?
The federal government already had demonstrated that it would spend public money to fool the public — producing fake television news that appeared on 40 stations, promoting its Medicare prescription-drug law. Why shouldn’t Williams get some of that loot?
The panel looking into the CBS incident found that those involved had acted with “myopic zeal” in rushing the broadcast to air before fully vetting it, but the investigators said they could not be certain that the zeal sprang from political bias.
Rather & Co. might have exhibited similar exuberance for half-baked evidence of liberal excesses, but I doubt that we’ll find many takers for that theory. He would not be alone, however, in trying to disguise political bias as journalism.
Those who engage in such excesses, of course, pay a price, as they should:
Four people at CBS — but not Rather — lost their jobs.
Rather will retire early and have to live with this incident as part of his legacy.
Tribune Media Services — like the Sentinel, part of Tribune Co. — dropped Williams’ column.
Others, however, also have been affected. As reader DeArmond seemed to imply, if TV networks would allow politics to drive news coverage, if pundits would substitute greed for honest opinion, can any journalist be trusted?
Another reader, Wayne Dickson of DeLand, addressed that before the fact in an electronic-mail message a couple of weeks ago. He stressed the need — for the news media but also for consumers of news — to distinguish between journalists and those who would manipulate public opinion and understanding for their own purposes.
“When one journalist lies, all journalists lose credibility,” Dickson wrote. “When the fourth estate loses credibility, the democracy is in jeopardy.”
Exactly.
