Someone tell Dan Rather that clairvoyance is not a "source"

The hat tip for this one goes to Roger H via this tweet. Get this: it turns out that not only did former President George W. Bush not dodge going to Vietnam, but he volunteered to go! However at that time he was 200 hours short on experience so he was not able to under the military regulations. Here's the pertinent excerpt:

Retired Col. Ed Morrisey, the man who swore Bush into the Guard, told CBS affiliate WVLT in Knoxville, Tenn., a different story. "The Air Force, in their ultimate wisdom, assembled a group of F-102s and took them to Southeast Asia. Bush volunteered to go. But he needed to have 500 (flight) hours, but he had just over 300 hours, so he wasn't able to go," Morrisey said.

Fact is, Bush enlisted as an airman basic in the 147th Fighter-Interceptor Group at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston on May 28, 1968 — when the 147th was participating in combat in Vietnam. From 1968 through 1970, pilots from the 147th participated in operation Palace Alert.

The F-102 Bush flew was designed primarily for defense against the threat of Soviet bombers, and units charged with this task were the best of the best. Only a return of his unit's mission to continental air defense before Bush completed his flight training made it unlikely he'd fly in combat. Bush avoided nothing.

The heart of the Mapes-Rather hatchet job was that Bush was a coward who avoided action in Vietnam. That was false, and CBS' own report on the matter shows that Mapes knew it was false.

Hey, maybe someone should tell Dan Rather! Forget it—that jerk knew.

Glad this article wasn't written using Microsoft word—that weird little "th" character screws up the blog for some web browsers.

Close Enough for Horseshoes, Grenades and the New York Times

It's so hard for me to read news about Dan Rather because, to put it bluntly, the guy is a schmuck and an unrepentant liar, and he's rarely called on it by his colleagues. He recently called for the big ol' friendly Federal Government to bail out the journalism industrial complex–which of course means the liberal media establishment–because no one reads their crap anymore. The jury is still out on why he is making these noises; is he jockeying for a Media Czar position, or does he just want to make sure CBS is solvent enough to dole out a settlement in his brand new $70,000,000.00 lawsuit against his former employer?

Unclear. But the memory of Rather's demise perfectly segues into the recent flap about Allesandra Stanley's pathetic mistake-laden tribute to Walter Cronkite. James Rainey attempts to probe the causes of this failure, while still remaining respectful of the Times. It's sort of a high-wire act, IMO, but yields some humor, if no particularly new insights about how hesitant news companies are to correct on-going problems.

The Cronkite appraisal felt like "a disaster, the equivalent of a car crash," as one editor put it, because of the prominence of the subject and because the newspaper had plenty of time to prepare for the ailing newsman's death.

Yet in her piece, Stanley, who previously worked as a foreign correspondent and covered the White House, misstated the dates of the first moon landing and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She had Cronkite covering D-day from the beaches of Normandy, instead of high overhead in a B-17.

Calame's successor and the paper's current public editor, Clark Hoyt, attributed the mistake-filled Cronkite appraisal to "a television critic with a history of errors [who] wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant [but] were not."

He suggested that tougher scrutiny by editors and better communication could have prevented the errors. No doubt.

Ya think?

Calame wrote in 2005 about what he said was a cut-and-dried inaccuracy, in which Stanley accused Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera of grandstanding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The TV critic wrote that Rivera "nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way," so he could help an older woman into a wheelchair. But Calame reviewed the video and saw no nudging.

Rather than agree to a correction, however, Times Editor Bill Keller defended Stanley for "writing as a critic, with the license that title brings." In other words, Rivera was showboating, so he had nudged his way into the story figuratively, if not literally.

Ah. Got it. This is the same "license" that allowed Dan Rather to use forged documents to support a charge that George Bush missed a required physical exam while in the National Guard. Rather never claimed that Bush literally missed the exam.

Would anyone at the Times suggest aloud that she is jealous of Geraldo Rivera whose name is much more of a household word across the country? I'm sure they wouldn't dare if the following is true:

Both of the Times' former public editors -- Daniel Okrent and Calame -- told me their critiques produced sharp rebukes from Stanley.

Okrent -- who once criticized the critic for tone, not accuracy -- remembers her as "extremely defensive and hostile," while Calame said she attacked him as a nitpicker.

A guess one man's tone is another's... nit.

"Stars or purported stars are obliged to get their facts right," the Times editor said. "Editors are obliged to edit everyone without fear or favor. Period."

Since it's not so clear that lesson has become ingrained deeply enough with everyone in the organization, it makes sense that the paper keeps an independent public editor on the payroll.

You see, this is all lip-service. Rainey is defending the Times for publishing corrections at the same time that he is scolding them for letting them happen. The fact is that people like Alessandra Stanley know that they have "star capital" and they live off the interest. Why should she accept any criticism? For a star journalist, making eight errors in print doesn't merit immediate punishment like throwing one interception might for a star quarterback. The errors are reported a day later in another print edition, yesterday's news. She doesn't have the experience of the locker room after a loss.

Craig Silverman–who outlines Stanley's history of mistakes in his article on this topic–suggests that Stanley be enrolled in a "a training program that helps her stop making simple factual errors at such an alarming rate." I'm sure she'd be thrilled about that. If she does take the first step and admit she has a problem, maybe she'll be spared the fate of Rather, whose forged document story was not the first time he bent the truth way past "truthiness".

Ultimately the reason that people like Alessandra Stanley, Dan Rather, Keith Olbermann, Rod Dreher and many journalists like them can be so ambivalent to stubborn facts is that that they are afflicted by superiority complexes common to anyone in the species which has been called "Wordsmith Intellectuals". I've commented before on this group drawing from an essay which states that "They [wordsmith intellectuals] shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves." This makes the stars among them rather more influential than quarterbacks and their mistakes more tragic than fumbles and interceptions. I suppose to a lesser degree, I am in this class with my influential (cough) blog. That's why I called upon my readers from the very outset to please correct me when I'm wrong.

Podhoretz on Cronkite

Lest we forget the Titan who helped screw up the media, J-Pod reminds us. Excerpt:

Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called “the adversary culture.” Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States “was mired in stalemate” in Vietnam—when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph.

“If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Johnson was reputed to have said, “I’ve lost middle America,” and shortly thereafter he announced he would not run for reelection. This was a mark of Johnson’s own poor political instincts—a president who thought a rich and powerful anchorman living the high life in New York city was the voice of the silent majority was a man out of touch with reality—but it was a leading indicator of how the media were changing. Cronkite didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to Tet, as the late Peter Braestrup demonstrated in his colossal expose of the scandalous media coverage of the battle, Big Story. But he knew that among the people who mattered to him, and who were the leading edge of ideological fashion, Tet was a failure failure because the war in Vietnam was bad, and he took to the airwaves to say so.

Well rest in peace, I guess, since you didn't know shit about war.

The good news the Podman reports is that the internets helped bring down Cronkite's clown successor.

When Rather attempted, in 2004, to bring down a president in the midst of a close reelection bid with a report based on obviously forged papers—a greater journalistic sin than Cronkite’s, by far—he was undone in 12 hours by a lawyer in Atlanta commenting on a blog and a jazz musician in Los Angeles with a blog who demonstrated the papers in question had been produced at least a decade after the report claimed they had. Had there been an Internet in 1968, and military bloggers aplenty, Cronkite’s false conclusion about Tet would have been challenged immediately; we would not have had to wait for Braestrup to publish his enormous book nine years later

Also he points out that the audience for the Cronkite-Rather brand of TV news flatulence has shrunk greatly which is good news.