CBS Promises 'Fair and Balanced' News

(From NewsMax.) Oh, they do, do they? Are the worthies at CBS now admitting that their coverage has been anything less than fair and balanced?

Actually, they're not. Note:

The CBS News chief was "pworking overtime to convince [White House communications director Dan] Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House," the magazine [Broadcasting & Cable] said, with [CBS News Division President Andrew] Heyward reportedly pledging: "From here on out [CBS] would [sic] do everything it could to be fair and balanced."

Well, you could have fooled me! Why did Dan Rather proceed to air with memoranda that he ought to have known were false, and did know that a lot of his experts thought were false? Why did he mangle the coverage of the election? Furthermore, I could probably fill a DVD with video clips of Dan Rather showing obvious bias throughout his career, and continuing to do so even after pledging to step down.

No, I don't judge Dan Rather's entire journalistic career by the Killian Memoranda, any more than I judged it by the Seven-minute Blackout back in 1988. But both incidents are symptomatic of Dan Rather's entire attitude toward his job and his role--an attitude of arrogance and pomposity that I find unrivalled in the annals of journalism, going clear back to Julius Caesar's original newspaper, Acta Diurna Senatus Romani ("The Roman Senate Journal"). Such has always been the attitude at the Big Three, and still is--though you'd think they'd abandon that ridiculous posture, when Fox News Channel is routinely giving them a ratings bath. Frankly, I think the Big Three have a worse problem with tired old hangers-on than do university faculties with their "tenured radical" contingent. The only thing that will solve the problem will be for the Big Three news divisions to die for lack of viewership.

And they may. Everyone knows by now that the sports desk is the big rainmaker at any network. So maybe The CBS Evening News with Whoever (rumor now has Katie Couric signing another multi-year contract with NBC and thus taking herself out of the running) will give way to The CBS Evening Sports Update with Ron Artest.