Confronting the CBS Evening News on their Election Coverage
Topic: Dan's Rather Biased
(background: I'd just finished asking the CBS Evening News people to look up some footage they'd taken of my son, the soldier training at Fort Hood, and suddenly the indignation I'd felt today over the latest series of slanted innuendo-ridden substitutes for reporting got the better of me. Oh, well, maybe the PAO at Ft. Hood knows what I want and where to get it.

The letter I wound up sending after having smooched their butts earlier to try to get a tape of my son riding on an M-113):

Dear CBS Evening News:

I just asked you to help me find some footage your people took of my son while he was at Ft.Hood, TX training for deployment to Iraq, but read this letter first before you do so.

I'd understand if, after I told you what I think of your coverage of the election, you all felt you didn't owe me any favors. I suppose the Public Affairs Office at Ft.Hood could point me in the proper direction, anyway.

I have tried to give your program the benefit of the doubt regarding your objectivity in reporting the news until recent months; however, morally, I feel as though now I have to confront your writers, reporters, and above all, Mr. Rather.

To say that your coverage of this election is slanted is to understate the case grotesquely.

John Forbes Kerry has admitted under oath to having committed war crimes on multiple occasions before the Fulbright Committee. After coming home from Vietnam, not only did he protest the war, as was his perfect right, but he campaigned openly for American withdrawal from Southeast Asia, knowing that after that occurred Stalinist purges would occur from Cambodia, to Laos, to South Vietnam itself.

After the US withdrew from Southeast Asia, partly on the strength of Kerry's testimony before the Senate and partly owing to the strategy which Kerry apparently helped the North Vietnamese with during the Paris Peace Talks, one and a half million people perished in the resulting purges and flight from governments which Kerry described to the Senate as morally equivalent to our own.

In Congress, John Kerry repeatedly stated that the United States faced no danger from Communism, even though the Soviets:
- broke the ABM and SALT I treaties not long after signing them;
- soon after signing the Biological Weapons Protocol, embarked on a massive research, development and biological weapons production program which culminated in the mid-1980s with Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev's orders to fill ICBM warheads with weaponized smallpox and plague for launch at targets in the US and UK;
- embarked on an ambitious program to spread Sovietism throughout Central America and the Caribbean, interrupted only by decisive action from the US under Ronald Reagan - action denounced bitterly at the time by John Kerry and his colleagues in Congress.

John Kerry staunchly supported dictator Daniel Ortega and his violently repressive Sandinista clique until the voters of Nicaragua finally, emboldened by support from the United States, ejected that whole terrorist crew from power.

Where is the coverage of all these stories?

You people covered the President's inglorious but non-lethal and non-traitorous National Guard service until bone-cracking yawns from across the country got your advertisers' attention.

But when the Swifties showed up, you people decided that it wasn't necessary to report on THAT story except to elliptically debunk it. Why is that?

The excuse "They're Republicans" won't hold up - those pathetic disgruntled employees 60 Minutes likes to parade before their cameras each week are all Democrats, aren't they? If the Swifties' testimony is suspect because they choose to exercise their right to vote for and campaign for the candidates and party of their choice, and it turns out not to be John Kerry's party, then what about the 60 Minutes Book Plug of the Week Club?

(And where's the "Oops" we're all owed after Joe Wilson turned out to be full of crap, by the way?)

And what about the political affiliations of the CBS Evening News' editorial staff? If the Swifties' mere political affiliation can be used by you to throw doubt on their veracity, then how about your own? Their personal honor against your professional ethics?

At the very least, many of us viewers, regardless of our political party (I, myself, am a registered Libertarian) would really like to have the Swift Boat issue investigated, and not covered up.

If the Swift Boat Veterans for Justice turn out to be wrong, or even lying, wouldn't that be an impressive story - especially if Kerry were right and the Swifties accepted more than legal advice from the White House political team?

Your program's refusal to investigate what, regardless of what turned out to be true - a malfeasant Kerry or vindictively mistaken Swifties - would be a very big story makes many people suspect that you are covering up a sorry episode in John Kerry's past - once again.

And how about letting us know where the huge amount of soft money behind Kerry is coming from? How much money George Soros has in this campaign, and how his support of despots in former Soviet republics makes his choice to support John Kerry with massive infusions of soft money is perhaps a little troubling?

And what about the utter failure of McCain-Feingold to do what it was promised to be able to do - keep the rich and powerful from shouting out less well-funded voices come election time? As it now stands, McCain-Feingold couldn't have been more beneficial to the Democratic Party if it had been just "Feingold."

As a former police officer who was loath to arrest anyone unnecessarily and have to explain that lack of necessity on the paperwork afterward, why weren't the charges on which the "record number of protesteres" described on your program?

Was there an attempt on the part of your program to investigate whether there was actually an attempt on the part of the protesters to break the law in large numbers in order to create the large number of arrests your program described repeatedly?

Was there any attempt by your program to investigate whether the local judge who ordered the release of several hundred protesters from custody owed his or her position to the Democratic Party?

I'm also interested in the complete lack of coverage of protests and protesters at the Demcoratic Convention in Boston this year. I know from reading print news sources that there were indeed such protests, but if I'd relied on your program for my information, I wouldn't have known that.

Finally, aren't you people concerned at all at what happens AFTER November, when the people realize that you have slanted the facts, hidden the truth, and barefacedly lied to them in order to get your man into the White House?

If we can't trust you on this story, what makes you think we'll trust you on anything else?

There was a point during the Reagan administration when the shrill slanting of news coverage against Ronald Reagan caused news viewers to drastically revise their ability to trust the news on a number of things. I seem to remember an opinion poll in which the esteem in which journalists were held actually fell down to the level formerly reserved for used car dealers and politicians.

Tell me you people plan to redeem yourselves at some point in the future. Then please do it.