Blue-ribbon panels on journalistic fraud usually perpetuate it
under the cloak of respectability, as they cling tenaciously to the
lie that the dominant media are free of corrupting liberal
bias.
CBS has decided under pressure that its viewers deserve to know
whether or not their news readers are crooks. So it has cobbled
together a two-man blue-ribbon panel, consisting of a tame
Republican, Dick Thornburgh, and an establishment liberal, Louis D.
Boccardi.
Boccardi is a veteran of the bias-denying panel the New York
Times formed in the wake of the Jayson Blair debacle. That
hoaxster was an obvious beneficiary of the New York
Times’s obsession with affirmative action. But the panel on
which Boccardi served made sure to ignore the central role
affirmative action played in abetting Blair’s hucksterism. The
panel produced the Siegal Report which gave New York Times
editor Bill Keller the sham-authoritative cover to deny loudly that
the black reporter’s inexplicable rise at the paper stemmed from
the paper’s diversity-at-all-costs program. Having promised never
to fake out readers, Keller’s first act as editor was to fake them
out, saying that the Siegal Report showed the “fraud Jayson Blair
committed on us and our readers was not a consequence of our
diversity program.”
This was false reporting, as even Howell Raines knew. Raines
admitted that his Alabama-bred white guilt blinded him to Blair’s
numerous acts of malpractice: “[You] have a right to ask if I, as a
white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance
too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I
look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
Just as the New York Times turned to establishment
types like Boccardi to ignore its racial favoritism, so CBS turns
to Boccardi to ignore its bias toward the Democratic Party. Get
ready for the same obtuse conclusions — that bureaucracy, not
bias, explains the scandal, that “competitive pressures caused a
lack of judgment,” and so on. These panels are designed to overlook
the obvious. Defining objectivity as liberalism itself, they never
conclude that liberals lack objectivity, just that they made this
or that “good-faith mistake,” which would never have happened if a
few more liberal ombudsmen were on the scene.
In Blair’s case, the panel overlooked the obvious by playing
dumb about the Times’s willy-nilly promotion of
incompetent minority reporters, even though Times Metro
editor Jonathan Landman had spelled out the scandal for anyone with
a functioning intellect left in the newsroom by saying, “It was
clear that Gerald [Boyd] felt pressure to promote Jayson and that
he thought it was the right thing to do. The racial dimension of
this issue and Gerald’s obvious strong feelings made it especially
sensitive; in that sense it is fair to say that I backed off a bit
more than I would have if race had not been a factor…I think
race was the decisive factor in his promotion.”
The Siegal Report had to downplay this testimony, concluding
with a ludicrous “Note on Affirmative Action” which contained a
more outrageous claim than found in Jayson Blair’s reporting: “The
Times’s recruitment occurs mainly within the context of
the American culture, with all of the extraordinary freight that it
has accumulated in the 400 years since Europeans first set foot on
this continent and encountered the people who already lived here.
Essentially that culture taught that white men were the only people
qualified to carry out the serious business of the world.”
Translation: Even if Jayson Blair was a product of the
Times’s standards-lowering affirmative action policies, it
will continue them to right the wrongs of Western Civilization.
Boccardi wouldn’t have lasted long on the New York
Times panel if he had said, “Look, you have to decide whether
you want to be a newspaper committed to excellence or an
affirmative action jobs program.” Similarly, CBS wouldn’t have
named him to its panel if he were planning to draw attention to the
network’s blinding biases.
The network is so snugly in the pocket of the Democrats that its
producers moonlight as matchmakers for like-minded Democrats. But
the donkey in the CBS newsroom will not be seen by its blue-ribbon
panel no matter how much manure accumulates.
