All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Upon arriving at the office today, this writer came upon a blog post about “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent Rita Braver’s conversation with Lynne Cheney. The post began:

CBS News correspondent Rita Braver's brown-nose interview with Lynne Cheney on Sunday was reason number 1,342 why I am cynical toward and very distrustful of the mainstream corporate media.

The author of the post, Micheal Petrelis, took issue with two main points:

The lighter tone of the interview.

The fact that Rita Braver’s husband is the lawyer who represents Lynne Cheney with publishers. It's important to note that Braver disclosed this herself during the interview.

I began a conversation with Braver about this issue early today, before finding out the conversation had widened to a couple of letters on Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews – the go-to site for a daily climate check of MediaLand. (It’s so “go-to,” we direct you to go to it in the list to the right ----->.)

There I found a letter from David Fluhrer, a self-described "public relations consultant with a healthy respect for journalism," raising the same points as Petrelis -- where he called the interview "fawning." And another from Lee Rood at the Des Moines Register.

In order to get a sense of the decision-making process, I got in touch with Rand Morrison, the Executive Producer of “CBS Sunday Morning” and shared with him the concerns out there in the blogosphere.

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In light of Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS/Viacom, I'm going to coin a Rather-esque saying: Writing about this story while working for CBS is tougher than playing Operation while traveling down a bumpy Lubbock road.

But here goes anyway.

By now we've all read and/or heard that former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather has filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS, as revealed in yesterday's New York Times:

Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a $70 million lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.”

According to the lawsuit, Rather's complaints revolve not only around the investigation but also the fallout surrounding the infamous "60 Minutes" story which looked into President Bush's national guard duty (uncreatively nicknamed "Memogate") – including his not having been assigned to cover Hurricane Katrina despite being "the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes" and a disagreement over the definition of "full-time."

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In light of Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS/Viacom, I'm going to coin a Rather-esque saying: Writing about the story while working for CBS is tougher than playing Operation while traveling down a bumpy Lubbock road.

But here goes anyway.

By now we've all read and/or heard that former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather has filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS, as revealed in yesterday's New York Times:Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a $70 million lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.
Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.”According to the lawsuit, Rather's complaints revolve not only around the investigation but also the fallout surrounding the infamous "60 Minutes" story which looked into President Bush's national guard duty (uncreatively nicknamed "Memogate") – including his not having been assigned to cover Hurricane Katrina despite being "the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes" and a disagreement over the definition of "full-time."

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CBS White House correspondent Jim Axelrod – you might remember him as the fellow labeled "defeatist" by then-White House press secretary Tony Snow – was involved in another tense exchange last week, this time with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

According to the Examiner article "Pelosi, Reid Take On Reporter":

CBS White House reporter Jim Axelrod mentioned to Pelosi that, come November 2008, the number of American troops in Iraq likely will be the same as in November 2006, when Democrats were swept into power. Then, he asked, “How do you view your stewardship of Congress as anything other than a failure to make the president change course?”

Pelosi was instantly taken aback. “What a lovely objective question on the part of the press!” she remarked.

And the blog world exploded with headlines like "Pelosi Shocked by CBS's 'Failure' Hardball from the Left ..." and "Nancy Pelosi Accuses Reporter of Bias"

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Public Eye takes you back to 1965, when abortions were not legal in the United States. In this broadcast, Walter Cronkite reported on the "legal, moral and medical aspects" of the abortion debate in America and around the globe..Click on the video box to watch.

Yesterday in this space we discussed a new article that raised the economic problems of covering Iraq … and how it’s a difficult business proposition.

But enough from the bean counters, what about the journalism? In the piece, TV news analyst Andrew Tyndall was quoted:

"We’re in a period of prolonged news doldrums," says Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes newscasts in the online "Tyndall Report." "Iraq is no longer a headline news story. There are no new things happening there; it’s just more of the same. That would be a true thing to say even if the security conditions were better. It’s stuck, militarily and diplomatically."

Later on in the piece, CBS Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan took issue with his characterization, saying:

"You don’t abandon the American soldiers who are on the streets of this country because people are tired of hearing about it," says Logan. "You don’t abandon the Iraqi people. You don’t abandon people like that because back home people are tired of hearing about the war. Our job is to find a way through that."

I was interested to hear what Logan meant by “find a way,” so I contacted her in Iraq yesterday and asked her to expand on that idea.

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Digging through the crates this week to just the sixth episode of "60 Minutes" that ever aired -- before it was even 400 minutes old -- back on December 12, 1968.

An international negotiator observes that “Divided countries are very difficult to bring together.”

Shoplifters are ruining the Christmas season, back in the days before Christmas was under attack.

Some football players play dirty.(?!)

(Click on the video box to watch.)

“Are FEMA Trailers Making Residents Sick?” was the CBS exclusive two months ago.

Fast forward to last night’s story on the “Evening News” “House Probes FEMA Cover-up”

And this morning’s Washington Post displayed the headline: “FEMA Knew Of Toxic Gas In Trailers .”

In a story that feels more than a little like “Erin Brockovich,” CBS’ investigative team followed some medical anecdotes circulating around the FEMA trailer camps, consulted a number of experts and looked into potential health concerns to get to the bottom of a troubling story.

As reported in that first story on May 16:

Today the government says 86,000 families are still living in those white FEMA travel trailers across the Gulf — more and more waking up with a host of health problems — tied, medical experts believe, to the place they still call home.

When Hurricane Katrina tore apart homes here in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Angela Orcutt and her young son Nicky found shelter in a FEMA trailer meant for weekend trips.

That trip has now lasted 21 months — something these trailers were not built for. Time that has turned them into human Petri dishes — unregulated experiments on the health of thousands still stuck inside.

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We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the biggest story of the day in MediaLand: Joe Hagan's New York Magazine piece on Katie Couric and the "Evening News." The piece includes some choice quotes from the "Evening News" anchor, including this one, about whether she ever questions her decision to come to CBS News: “I mean, of course. I’m human. I’m not going around, ‘Dee-da dee-da dee.' I have days when I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ But for some weird reason, they don’t happen that often.” Go here to check it out.

It's Friday -- which is the day after Thursday -- and that means it's time for us to continue the Public Eye Chat we began yesterday (discussing Vatican media protocol, among other things) with CBS News London Correspondent Richard Roth.

Matthew Felling: As for the events of the last week, were there any surprises or difficulties that popped up in covering the bombing attempts?

Richard Roth: There’s always difficulty here in the lack of information released once the criminal process is underway. For example, when the police tell you that someone’s arrested – I’m on one of the alert systems that the Metropolitan Police have – here’s the kind of detail you get: “We’ve arrested A, B and C” is what the e-mail says. They may have ages, towns where the arrests took place. But there’ll be nothing more than that. Slowly, some of the information may filter out, but on an official level, they’re so careful and so concerned about pre-trial publicity that could influence the criminal justice process that there’s very little specific information that comes out. That’s what you see unfolding in this story. There’s going to be a lot [of media coverage] about this that I’ll bet will either be wrong in substance or wrong in small details by the time this procedure is over. That’s always a frustration.

I was only on this story on Friday, when it was very quickly developing in terms of what had actually happened. But it was essentially the same frustrations all journalists feel who want to get facts and get enough of them right in a story that’s breaking fast.

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