What’s Really Wrong With the MSM?
Dec 7th, 2007 at 12:06 pm by Susie
Eric Alterman in the Nation with a good piece. I was especially intrigued by point No. 4:
4. Its corporations fire, and then buy the silence of, their own reporters in order to hide the truth, when it involves the draft records of certain conservative Republican Presidents. After being fired by CBS News as the chosen fall-person for Dan Rather’s story on George W. Bush’s draft avoidance, producer Mary Mapes published Truth and Duty, a book that insisted the story was true, the documents were real and she had been the victim of a deal between CBS’s parent, Viacom, and the Bush White House to quash the story. After the book’s publication, CBS paid Mapes an undisclosed sum to settle her lawsuit against the company and required her to sign a confidentiality agreement covering the deal. The three other CBS staffers working with Rather on the story were also fired and given settlements, one reportedly worth $3 million. Recall that the documents in question, while never authenticated, have never been proven to be forgeries, and CBS’s own committee of inquiry took no position on their veracity.
“Draft avoidance” seems a mild term to use when speaking of desertion in a time of war…
“CBS’s own committee of inquiry took no position on their veracity” but it should have. All available evidence consistently indicates that Bush simply walked away from his commitment to serve. The issue of whether these particular documents were originals, reproductions, or forgeries is a glowingly red herring.
That part of Alterman’s piece seemed to me rather thin gruel. Of course, maybe he didn’t follow the story of Bush’s ANG service very closely … who knows?
The point about settlements of silence is very well taken.
I have a friend who was fired from Cap Cities/ABC after more than two decades for having a double mastectomy (not kidding). Her settlement requires her silence (but not mine).
She worked for their medical group. They publish magazines to keep doctors up to date on the latest news and developments in medicine. They regularly quashed stories about discoveries of various side effects (or lack of efficacy) for prescription medications. On the grounds that their advertisers (who are mostly pharmaceutical companies). Even when it was scientists from the pharmaceuticals who were publishing the papers warning about the side effects. Even when the papers pointed to other prescription medications which did not have the problems.
If my friend had not signed the non-disclosure agreement after the settlement, she could have written a very interesting article on the consequences of these practices to our healthcare system (perhaps even a book). (Her settlement was way less than $3 million, by the way. But the money was important to her at the time.)
See? And people think I’m too hard on the pharmaceutical industry. They make harmful drugs that don’t work and often produce the very thing they’re supposed to fix (antidepressants) - but I’m just crazy.
I haven’t seen read anything yet, but I’ll bet you anything that kid who just shot up that mall was on antidepressants.