Nobody else seems to be jumping into the MSM Story of the Week so I’ll put my oar in.
I’m not a big consumer of TV news. On the rare occasion that I do watch, I usually tune in to Fox News. Other than the local affiliate WRAL’s website, which is actually pretty good, I have very little interest in CBS News.
In fact, the last time I remember watching The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather was October 14, 2003, when I was on a poorly-done report CBS called “Homeschool Nightmares”. Rather’s contribution was to suggest that homeschooling parents should undergo a criminal background check before they be allowed to keep their six-year-olds at home.
No, that’s not verbatim, but that is the necessary result of Rather’s comments. It was a throwaway line to accompany a badly researched story, but words have meanings and ideas have consequences — even if a fair and accurate report would have interfered with “the story we wanted to tell,” as the correspondent told us.
The whole story is online in several places, including our response here and other comments in dozens of places. All I can say is when the “Memogate” story broke, I wasn’t surprised.
