The Whitewash Report
Friday 21 January 2005 @ 3:39 pm

January 12, 2005

by Hugh Hewitt

The long awaited internal report from CBS on the use of forged documents by Dan Rather and “60 Minutes 2″ in the effort to smear President Bush last fall is a huge disappointment. The substance of the report is, in fact, a whitewash, a wrist slap that tosses four employees overboard but not Dan Rather, and which finds fault with many specifics of the reporting but which refuses to say whether there was a political agenda at work in the production of the story.

Former attorney general Richard Thornburgh failed in his central task: To shine a light on the agenda journalism of mainstream media. Even a declaration that there was no bias would have been preferred to the declaration that the panel could not reach a verdict.

The transparency of the whitewash will only underscore the collapse of the credibility of mainstream media. Very few observers doubt that Rather and company were hunting the president and hoping to help John Kerry.

Denying the obvious only makes obvious the corruption inside CBS.

Hugh Hewitt is the host of the Hugh Hewitt Show.
hughhewitt.com

Read Hugh’s column at The Weekly Standard.
weeklystandard.com

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