FOLLOWING THE RIGHT-WING SCRIPT

Now that the inquiry into CBS's faulty reporting on Georgie Boy's National Guard service has resulted in the dismissal of four top news executives, the Bush regime suddenly values the principle of accountability. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said, without the slightest irony, "CBS has taken steps to hold people accountable, and we appreciate those steps."

Somebody should extend the inquiry. The independent panel -- Louis Boccardi and Dick Thornburgh -- ought to be asked to take a look into a) the Bush regime itself for its rush to war in Iraq, and b) The New York Times for its faulty reporting on WMD before and during the invasion.

Five will get you 50 they would find the same sort of flaws found at CBS -- "myopic zeal," poor judgment, rushed decisions, executives cowed by their superiors, failure to do rudimentary fact-checking, and a "rigid and blind" defense when shown errors.

The Times did eventually report on its own flaws, although Steven Rendall of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting makes the widely noted but nonetheless telling point that the paper failed to discipline anyone on a much more important story than CBS's.

Moreover, Rendall suggested this morning on Democracy Now! that the disparity in the measures taken by CBS and the Times, has to do with right-wing political pressure and "following the script" about liberal media bias: CBS's faulty report opposed the Bush regime (and could have hurt Georgie Boy's re-election chances), while the Times's faulty WMD reporting supported the Bush regime (and its rationale for war in Iraq). Therefore, CBS had to prove it took seriously allegations of liberal bias, even though the inquiry found no conclusive evidence of that, but the Times did not have to prove anything of the kind.

Postscript: Yes, I've avoided mentioning Dan Rather. He was let off, and so was CBS News President Andrew Heyward. But, in fact, Rather will be departing as CBS news anchor in a couple of months. And speculation already has Heyward's head about to roll.
January 11, 2005 9:41 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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