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Eight Notes for Hugh Hewitt.

1. You’re surprised by the Thornburg/Boccardi report? Let me get this straight, a major media outlet goes out of its way to sink the Presidents re-election campaign with a clear vendetta, gets caught and exposed in the execution of the story and then tries to slink away into the night rather than admit it publically. And yet, you are surprised, somehow expecting what exactly? This is hardly news; this is common behavior for large ossified organizations. What is news this time is that they got caught, caught publically and just like Jayne Mansfield discovering a bit too late that her scarf was just a bit too long, CBS News has also nearly lost it's head over this one issue. Much like the Polish Calvary realised in 1939, CBS has realized too late that the world has changed, and there are now thousands and thousands of media outlets, many of which can actually tell when they are being defrauded. The biggest issue for CBS News to deal with is this - if you cant tell this story was a fraud, then what good are you? If we can't trust you with simple things, should we give you the benefit for the big things?

My Dear Mr. Hewitt, you not should be at all surprised that CBS News has taken the "line of least resistance" in resolving this issue. They were never going to hop up barefooted on the conference table and run straight through the plate glass window falling all the way down to the street from the 77th floor while screaming “WE GOT CAUGHT!!!”. We know they got caught, they know we caught them, to expect them to do anything else except issue a heavily vetted,legally "safe" document and "fire" a few underlings would be to expect something out of character for people who are far "too much lawyer" and not enough Sam Fuller to be men about it and admit when they've clearly been had. If you think a single word in this report wasn't reviewed by 100 lawyers before it was released, you're just not paying attention.

Frankly, there are still legions at CBS News who lament not the story and its basis, but the "getting caught", and that is a damn shame for everyone.

2. Mary Mapes did not get fired, She got a promotion. This is not the end of her career but the start of her ‘sainted victimhood’, where she will publish endless piles of books on the subject of the right wing cabal and appear breathless at fundraisers, while appearing thrice daily on Air America and NPR to opine on the latest great offence from the 'scabknucked bohunks' that inhabit the White House in the Bush Administration.

3. CBS news is toast. They would be better off selling the airtime back to the affiliates or to Ron Popeil. With it will go soon ABC and NBC Nightly News. They simply do not make enough money to justify their grotesque cost. When they do finally go away, not one of them will understand that when they started to sell opinion as actual news, that they lost all credibility in the eyes and ears of the viewers and they began to look elsewhere. What has totally surprised CBS is not that they went looking, but that they’ve found it. They've found it in the blogosphere.

4. People who look pretty and read from Teleprompters are not “reporters”. When people who read from telepromters refer to themselves as being a "reporter" our natural reaction should be to violently laugh and buckle over horizontally at the hips. "Reporters" are men like Sam Fuller, Ernie Pyle and William Shirer. There are no men like this today, the media's legal staff would simply not permit it.

5. Anchormen are thrice removed from everyday human beings and cannot be expected to understand the culture and life of the average man-in-the-street. They know better than us, or so they think which is why they are going extinct. No one likes a wiseass, Americans particularly don’t like that sort of thing.

6. ‘Big Media’ began to die when someone said; “E.J.Dionne is a smart guy, let’s book him for the Sunday Shows”.

7.The current leftist fetish of “Talking truth to power” marks the end of the modern profession of journalism. If journalism were correctly practiced, this concept would never have seen the light of day in any class with even a basic sense of ethics.

8. The study of "Journalism" has become a place for high school students who cannot act well enough to go further in Drama, think well enough to progress in Science and are not allowed near anything sharp, and thus cannot take any Shop Class. And before you go there, don’t. There’s never once in recorded human history been a big media type who was once an A/V Geek, and there’s a good reason for it. We A/V types have out standards. We might have worn high water pants and listened to Doctor Demento, but there are some things that are just-not-done.

Posted @ January 11, 2005 01:03 AM | Current Affairs