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Bush fired Dan Rather!
- Thread starter R.James
- Start date
And in other news, batboy has been spotted again. "He's at it once more" Billy Bob said to the Weekly World News reporter...
I trust drudge as far as I can throw him, his computer, and his sack of lies.
I trust drudge as far as I can throw him, his computer, and his sack of lies.
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Alarum said:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1032354,00.html
(For the source of the story)
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Now you see that I'll take. But the guy who had the exclusive report on Nuclear weapons in Iraq, baffling everyone on the ground... no. He gets no more leniency, he's hung himself.R.James said:
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R.James said:
While to say "Bush fired Dan Rather" is a bit much, i can see why Putin (or anyone, for that matter) would reach this conclusion.
Not fully substantiated (or wholly fabricated) news stories are put forth by the American media day-in, day-out (Swiftboat Vets, Jessica Lynch) - none of these other stories, which had the same type of credibility problems as the Bush military service story, resulted in any journalists losing their job, or resigning, or any real negative backlash. However, when the content of the article was anti-George Bush, heads roll.
Regardless of how it actually happened, it's not surprising why people would think that Bush (or the Bush Administration) was behind the Dan Rather firing.
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I'd like to see the original quote from Putin, not a paraphrase. Because if it is as it is reported here, it's a legitimate question, and doesn't imply that Putin thinks the White House directly fired Rather.
The press in the US is not free. Not because the US government directly controls the media, but because it is able to use a combination of indirect controls. Access is highly controlled - embedded reporting, for example. Moreover, US media is corporate media, and those corporations are not focussed on news reporting. They are focussed on their profit margin. The individual editors and writers may be, but the companies who hire&fire and who control distribution are not. And since corporate lobbying is such a force in the US, and also because many corporations are currently skirting if not outright breaking monopoly laws in the US, there is considerable pressure on those corporations to suck up the the government.
It sounds like the "senior administration official" (why no attribution?) is spinning Putin's response to make it sound absurd...so I ask the question a different way...if the US media is so free, why did TIME not look at this more critically, instead of sound-bite quoting and making vague allegations against Putin?
By the way, Putin speaks English. He can access US media coverage directly without relying on aides.
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Milla said:
Perhaps the assumption was that since Bush doesn't access the media directly and relies on aides to sum up the news for him, that Putin did the same.
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whatbogsends said:
To be fair, I've no idea whence Putin gets his news; I'm just saying, it seems an irresponsible reporting choice on the part of TIME to state
without providing any of the evidence which led to this analysis, relying wholly on a few unattributed quotes from "aides". It's rather hypocritical to do this, actually, considering that this article is criticizing Putin's a)credulousness and b)doubt of the American free press...
It's also an odd allegation to make against him, that he relies too much on aides for information. His reputation in the Russian media (that subsection of it which I read, anyway) would have him as a tyrannical micromanager, quite the opposite of the view espoused in the TIME article. I doubt either view is wholly correct.
Moreover, I hardly think it's logical to criticize Putin for not being fully aware of the CBS/Dan Rather issue; frankly, I'm rather impressed that he was able to cite it off the top of his head (assuming that he asked the question right after the topic of press freedom in Russia was raised by Bush; the article is quite vague), considering that it was a non-issue as far as Russia-US relations are concerned. I rather doubt that without being first briefed Bush could have, for example, referenced Oleg Dobrodeyev's switch to VGTRA from NTV, which was a big issue for recent Russian press freedom.
Do I think Putin is a good democrat? No. But I do think this article was unfair to him, and poor journalism to boot.
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ScottishJohn
Contributor
Milla said:
Moreover, I hardly think it's logical to criticize Putin for not being fully aware of the CBS/Dan Rather issue; frankly, I'm rather impressed that he was able to cite it off the top of his head (assuming that he asked the question right after the topic of press freedom in Russia was raised by Bush; the article is quite vague), considering that it was a non-issue as far as Russia-US relations are concerned. I rather doubt that without being first briefed Bush could have, for example, referenced Oleg Dobrodeyev's switch to VGTRA from NTV, which was a big issue for recent Russian press freedom.
Haha does Bush even know they have more than one TV network in the Russian Federation!!!
Excellent post!
(spread your rep blah blah - sorry!)
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I say we give Putin the benefit of the doubt. Whether it was Bush or not, his question was "If the American press is free, why have those reporters lost their jobs?"
Freedom does NOT just mean freedom from Government, it means freedom. No one was fired over the gross mishandling of the Jessica Lynch story. No one was fired over the Faux News story claiming we had "found the wmds," and those are examples of downright falsehood being published as truth. In Rather's case, all that happened was ONE SOURCE for his story was questionable, and his overall conclusion, that Bush recieved favorable treatment in TANG, is still almost certainly true.
Freedom does NOT just mean freedom from Government, it means freedom. No one was fired over the gross mishandling of the Jessica Lynch story. No one was fired over the Faux News story claiming we had "found the wmds," and those are examples of downright falsehood being published as truth. In Rather's case, all that happened was ONE SOURCE for his story was questionable, and his overall conclusion, that Bush recieved favorable treatment in TANG, is still almost certainly true.
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Jarfice said:
I couldn't agree more. The "liberal" media has been shifting further and further to the right over the last few years.
The Dan Rather story was not held to the same non-accountability as the Swiftboats, Jessica Lynch, or WMDs. (more aptly the other false stories were not held to the same accountability as the Dan Rather story, though the non-accountability of these other stories preceded the Dan Rather incident).
While the average reporter may still be "liberal", it seems clear that the controls of the media outlet are on the right.
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