Checks and Balances

So much has been written about the last gasps of the CBS 60 Minutes fiasco, I feel little need to add to it here.

But this post by Power Line (so instrumental in the original exposure of this story) seeks what ultimately is, perhaps, the real lesson.

The fundamental problem that led to the downfall of 60 Minutes and, perhaps, CBS News, was the fact that no one involved in the reportorial or editorial process was a Republican or a conservative. If there had been anyone in the organization who did not share Mary Mapes's politics, who was not desperate to counteract the Swift Boat Vets and deliver the election to the Democrats, then certain obvious questions would have been asked: Where, exactly, did these documents come from? What reason is there to think that they really originated in the "personal files" of a long-dead National Guard officer, if his family has no knowledge of them? How did such modern-looking memos come to be produced in the early 1970s? How can these critical memos, allegedly by Jerry Killian, be reconciled with the glowing evaluations of Lt. Bush that Killian signed? Why haven't you interviewed General "Buck" Staudt, who is casually slandered in one of the alleged memos? Why didn't you show the memos to General Bobby Hodges, rather than reading phrases from them to him over the telephone? Isn't it a funny coincidence that these "newly discovered" memos are attributed to the one person in this story who is conveniently dead?

And so on, ad nearly infinitum. But, because virtually everyone in the CBS News organization shared Mary Mapes's politics and objective (i.e., the election of John Kerry), skeptical questions were not asked. If there is a single overriding explanation for how a fake story, intended to influence a Presidential election through the use of forged documents, could have been promulgated by 60 Minutes, it is the lack of diversity at CBS News.

For some years now, the party line of the mainstream media has been: of course we're pretty much all Democrats, but that doesn't influence our news coverage. If nothing else, Rathergate should put that defense to rest once and for all.

It doesn't really matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat, liberal, conservative or centrist.  No matter who or what you are, the idea of a monolithic media should be frightening to all.

If you share the beliefs of a non-diverse media, you may think that this is to your advantage.  But the reality is that a lack of idealogical diversity is to the advantage of no one.

In a very real sense, it's impossible to ever have a complete lack of bias.  No matter how we strive, our values and beliefs color how we view the world.

Thus, the best hope is that those doing the reporting do represent ideological diversity. 

And the Mapes-Rather-CBS-60 Minutes debacle is the proof that confirms this thesis.