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Contributors
Cliff Kincaid- Contributor
Cliff Kincaid, serves as editor of the Accuracy
in Media (AIM)
Report. A veteran journalist and media critic, Cliff has
appeared on the Fox News programs Hannity & Colmes and
The O'Reilly Factor, where he debated O'Reilly on global
warming, the death penalty,
and the homosexual agenda. He was a guest co-host on CNN's Crossfire
(filling in for Pat Buchanan) in the 1980s, where he confronted
the then-Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. with evidence of Libyan
involvement in international terrorism. Through his America's
Survival, Inc., organization (www.usasurvival.org), he has been
an advocate on behalf of the families of victims of terrorism
and has published reports and held conferences critical of the
United Nations. His articles have appeared in the Washington
Post, Washington Times, Chronicles, Human Events, Insight, and
other publications. He served on the staff of Human Events for
several years and was an editorial writer and newsletter editor
for former National Security Council staffer Oliver North at
his Freedom Alliance educational foundation. He has written or
co-authored nine books on media and cultural affairs and foreign
policy issues. Cliff is married and has three sons.[go to
Kincaid index]
 Heads
Should Roll At USA Today
CBS isn't by itself in agenda journalism...
[Cliff Kincaid] 9/23/04
CBS News
and Dan Rather have been taking a beating over the use of the
forged documents,
but USA Today has a lot to explain
and heads should roll there, too. It also received and publicized
the phony documents from Bill Burkett, assuming they were authentic.
It used Burkett as a confidential source and its standards for “verifying” the
documents turn out to be even worse than those of CBS News!
On September 9, one
day after the 60 Minutes story aired, USA Today was out with
its own story under the headline, “Guard
commander’s memos criticize Bush,” by Dave Moniz
and Jim Drinkard.
The story was based
on “newly disclosed documents,” the
paper claimed. It said “the memos” were “obtained
by USA Today and also reported Wednesday on the CBS program 60
Minutes…” The paper went on to say that White House
communications director Dan Bartlett “did not dispute the
documents’ authenticity.”
So USA
Today expected
the White House to do the job of verifying or debunking the
documents. This was a critical mistake also
made by CBS news. Obviously, the White House did not have enough
time to do that. And it’s not the administration’s
job to research stories for the Big Media. The White House took
the defensible position that it was assuming the documents were
valid because they had been supplied by a “reputable” news
organization. The White House didn’t think Dan Rather would
sink so low as to pawn off phony documents as legitimate.
Not only did USA
Today make the same mistake as CBS News, but the newspaper’s editors used the CBS News broadcast of
the story as further proof that they were somehow valid. Hence,
USA Today made two critical mistakes. Its “fact-checking” was
even worse than CBS News, which at least went through the motions
of appearing to consult some “experts” about the
documents’ validity.
USA Today now acknowledges
that its reporter Dave Moniz met with Burkett shortly after
the 60 Minutes program aired. USA Today says Moniz “had dealt with” Burkett “on
previous stories related to the National Guard” and that
Burkett gave Moniz “copies of the same documents he gave
CBS.”
USA Today editors
say they ran with the story about the memos because they chose
to “rely in part on 60 Minutes’ reporting” and
on Bartlett’s decision not to immediately contest the documents.
But USA Today tried to defend the documents, after doubts were
being raised, by insisting that the signatures on the disputed
memos “matched those on many of Bush’s publicly released
records.” This was obviously not true.
Now that Washington
Post reporter Howard Kurtz is raising questions about USA
Today’s role, USA Today Executive Editor John
Hillkirk is telling him that, “We never did vouch for the
documents’ authenticity,” as if that constitutes
a defense of the story.
The bottom line is that USA
Today is caught up in the same scandal
that is threatening the careers of Dan Rather, producer Mary
Mapes and CBS News President Andrew Heyward.
A September 21 USA
Today story by Dave Moniz, Jim Drinkard and Kevin Johnson,
published under the headline, “Texan
Has Made Allegations for Years,” admitted that Burkett “has
acknowledged lying to CBS and USA Today about where he obtained
the questionable documents allegedly written by Bush’s
Guard commander.” The story said that the paper had been
investigating Burkett’s allegations since 2002.
After investing this much time and effort in Burkett, however,
the paper clearly had not seen through his lies and deceptions
in time to question the phony documents. It looks like USA
Today,
like CBS News, wanted to believe the allegations against Bush,
no matter what the evidence showed.
Incredibly, however,
in another September 21 story, USA Today reporter Peter Johnson
cited the CBS scandal as another in a
series of cases of “flawed stories, lying reporters or
both.” He admitted that USA Today was one of those cases,
having suffered a major blow to its credibility when its reporter
Jack Kelley was caught committing massive fabrications. But he
didn’t note that USA Today was suffering a black eye in
the phony documents scandal with its own disgraceful conduct.
The fact that USA
Today was scooped with the phony story doesn’t
get the paper off the hook. USA Today compounded Dan Rather’s
error by using the appearance of the documents on CBS News as
a reason to go forward. It was bad enough that the paper used
Burkett as a confidential source. But basing stories in USA
Today on the work of Dan Rather and CBS News when the paper on its
own had been working with Burkett for two years? USA Today editor
Ken Paulsen has some explaining to do. CRO
copyright
2004 Accuracy in Media
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