After ignoring criticism on Monday of President Obama's claim to 60 Minutes that the intelligence community was to blame for having "underestimated" ISIS, Tuesday's CBS This Morning finally caught up with the story as co-host Norah O'Donnell declared: "...intelligence officials sort of brustled [sic] at hearing the President say that the intelligence community may have underestimated this threat. I mean, publicly, there's a paper trail of intelligence officials before Congress saying ISIS is a problem."
Fellow co-host Charlie Rose added: "We're also now hearing from high-level intelligence officials off the record, you know, that they think that it was wrong in a sense, as to some are suggesting, to throw intelligence community under the bus. I'm not sure the President meant to do that. But clearly, there is a push-back on the part of the intelligence community saying, 'We tried to tell you.'" [Listen to the audio]
60 Minutes
National Journal’s Ron Fournier was apparently among those who endured President Obama's appearance on "60 Minutes" this evening.
Fournier was able to succinctly summarize the contents of Obama's interview with Steve Kroft, the network's designated softball pitcher, in a tweet appearing shortly after its conclusion (HT Twitchy):
Starting Friday night, CBS began previewing an exclusive 60 Minutes interview with Leon Panetta, which aired on Sunday night, where the former Secretary of Defense said he had advised President Obama to arm the Syrian rebels as early as 2012. Despite Panetta’s criticism of President Obama’s strategy to combat ISIS, ABC and NBC have ignored the story altogether despite having multiple opportunities since the preview for the interview first aired on Friday’s CBS Evening News w/ Scott Pelley.
On Sunday, CBS's "60 Minutes" will broadcast Scott Pelley's recent interview of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
In CBS's promotional tease, which was broadcast on Friday, in response to Pelley's question about whether he was confident that the U.S. troop withdrawal "was the right thing to do" at the time it was done, Panetta said, "No, I wasn't." That's big news. How big? So big that, based on searches on Panetta's last name, the Associated Press and the New York Times have yet to cover it. In other words, it's fair to contend that these two leading icons of American journalism are waiting for an administration response before they run the story, so they can then turn it into a "White House denies" piece. The video follows the jump.
In a Tuesday column for Salon, Heather Digby Parton argued that the Dan Rather Memogate scandal had a sequel of sorts, in which CBS News, attempting to "appease the right wing" -- including the Bush administration -- gave "notorious pro-military war hawk" Lara Logan a prominent role in its programming, only to have it blow up in their faces when Logan's "60 Minutes" story about the Benghazi attack proved seriously flawed.
In Parton's view, Rather at CBS had "a stellar career of war reporting, muckraking and speaking truth to power" and now, on Mark Cuban's AXS TV, "does some really interesting work," though she acknowledges that "only a handful of people see" it.
Veteran investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson resigned from CBS News after 20 years with the network, expressing frustration at being unable to get her stories on air. Following Attkisson’s resignation, the folks at Fox News’ “Media Buzz” expressed dissatisfaction at the state of journalism in America’s newsrooms and the culture of liberal bias that exists.
Appearing on the program on Sunday March 16th, the entire panel acknowledged the disturbing trend of journalists putting their politics above journalism with host Howard Kurtz observing that Attkisson felt it “was almost impossible to get these tougher pieces on the air.”
In a huge victory for the second-largest U.S. oil company, a U.S. district judge ruled March 4, that a $9.5 billion award against Chevron by an Ecuadorean court was “obtained by corrupt means.” The massive figure had been lowered by Ecuador’s highest court in 2013 after an earlier decision against Chevron of $19 billion.
The broadcast networks took no notice of the decision and failed to mention it on their evening news programming March 4. They found time to mention that Niagara Falls had once again frozen, report a trash problem on Mount Everest, say that rain didn’t stop the Mardi Gras party in New Orleans, and to show how people can make money with their home recipes.
The New York Times published an unintentionally humorous headline on December 23: “When ‘60 Minutes’ Checks Its Journalistic Skepticism at the Door.” Times media columnist David Carr is suddenly stunned that “60 Minutes” has aired a puff piece on a serious political matter.
In his article, Carr didn’t breathe a word about Steve Kroft’s long history of servile interviews with Barack Obama, most recently in January when he threw softballs at both Obama and Hillary Clinton at the president’s request. Carr’s never written about Kroft.
Former CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather, despite being fired as a result of the bogus story, continues to maintain that he got it right in September 2004 when he aired forged documents concerning George W. Bush’s record with the Air National Guard.
On CNN’s Piers Morgan Live Monday, Rather said, “No question the story was true” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
On Sunday's 60 Minutes, CBS's Steve Kroft boosted the agenda of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-identified socialist, by granting him 30 seconds of air time to attack billionaire Pete Peterson, who was featured on the November 17, 2013 edition of the news program. However, this half-minute block was 2.5 times the amount that Peterson got during Charlie Rose's report [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
Rose merely played a 12-second soundbite of Peterson during the segment, and mentioned the former Nixon Cabinet official's involvement with a group of philanthropists, who are donating at least 50 percent of their wealth to charity:
On the Monday, November 11, All In with Chris Hayes show on MSNBC, host Hayes fretted about CBS News correspondent Lara Logan being biased in favor of military action against terrorists. He also theorized that her retraction for using a dishonest source in her Benghazi piece "would be a huge story" if a conservative was being criticized, as he alluded to Dan Rather's story about former President George W. Bush and the National Guard. Hayes began:
Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal and the NSA snooping have all failed thus far to cause the liberal mainstream media to break away from their instinctive partisan-protect mode into a cover regardless of political implication mode.
The betting here is that team Obama is counting on the liberal media giving them the breathing room they need to get things straightened out [on Obamacare] and so the liberal mainstream media will never come down too hard on them. Just enough to be able to say that “we did our jobs as journalists,” but never so much as to cause any real harm to the liberal cause."