Blood Lust

In his article "CBS Betrays Its Blood Lust for Bush", The Herald's television columnist, Glenn Garvin, gives the best summation of the CBS Rathergate panel report that I've seen. It's especially satisfying seeing this article in print in the pages of the Miami Herald, whose editor last year swore there was no such thing as liberal bias in the news. Garvin concludes:

So CBS reporters spent five years on a story they had been told from the beginning was shaky; they plotted a book deal for a source to encourage disclosures that ''could possibly change the momentum of an election;'' they got in bed with the Kerry campaign; but political bias doesn't have anything to do with it?

That's a conclusion that will play very well at CBS, which has spent three decades burying its head in the sand to avoid being confronted with Rather's political shenanigans. He publicly insulted President Nixon, then got into an on-air shouting match with the first President Bush. Just three years ago he gave a speech at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Texas. If the network had disciplined Rather for any of those things, if it had sent a message that it wouldn't tolerate confusion between its reporters' personal politics and their professional duties, it might have avoided Monday's humiliating mess.

Likewise, the independent panel would have done CBS an immense favor by advising the network to take a hard look at itself. Former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias, wrote that many newsrooms are locked in a collective groupthink that prevents them from noticing their political leanings any more than a fish notices water.

It's not that there's a morning meeting where reporters and editors sit down to conspire against Bush or Republicans; rather, because they overwhelmingly share the same liberal ideology, what strikes outsiders as political bias simply seems common sense to them. If ''everybody knows'' that Bush is a liar, a coward and a spoiled rich kid, there's no need to spend a lot of time proving it.

The independent panel came tantalizingly close to putting its finger on the problem when it said CBS pursued the Bush story with ''myopic zeal.'' But the panel attributed the myopia to competitive journalistic instincts, the drive to get a story first, rather than politics. After all, everybody knows there's no liberal bias in the news business.