Bush/McCain Bias of Bob Schieffer and Viacom/CBS

McCamy Taylor

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Tue Oct-14-08 10:31 PM
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Bush/McCain Bias of Bob Schieffer and Viacom/CBS

I am not saying that veteran newsman Bob Schieffer is going to do anything bad tomorrow night. He has a long, respectable journalistic career to think about, and John McCain is a losing proposition. However, the people who plan to watch the final debate need to remember that anytime the corporate media is involved, there will be bias. Too much money is involved in the mergers and operations of the telecoms for them to do anything like provide neutral coverage of a presidential campaign. Individual newsmen can choose to do their jobs in an objective way---but hey, reporters are just human.

I. Meet W.’s Good Buddy From Fort Worth, Texas, Bob Schieffer of CBS

There ought to be rules for journalists. Disclaimer laws. People who have conflicts of interest should be forced to tattoo them on their forehead or at least wear them on a badge or have a permanent crawl on the screen beneath them.

The disclaimer for Bob Schieffer would read something like:

“Played golf, went to ballgames, attended spring training with W. in the 1990s. His brother was W.’s partner in the Ballpark deal, made millions, was his ambassador to Australia then Japan. Said about Bush ‘He’s a great guy!’”

Here is an article from The Daily Howler about Bob Schieffer’s long history of pro-Bush and pro-McCain bias. It’s a good read.

http://mediabloodhound.typepad.com/weblog/2008/05/story-of-the-da.html

About Bush in the flight suit:

SCHIEFFER: As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time.

He was kidding, right? This is great photographic journalism:

This is a grown up kid playing dress up at tax payer expense in order to glorify a colonial venture.

Media Matters caught Schieffer lying for Bush on the very first night when he replaced Dan Rather (whom CBS nailed to a cross for Bush, more on that later) on the CBS Evening News in March 2005. Recall that after courting conservative votes in 2004 by promising to stop gay marriage, Bush dumped that plan and decided to raid Social Security instead. Schieffer tried to calm people’s fears by claiming that Chile’s privatized Social Security program was a big success, when in fact poor and middle income people in Chile have seen their savings eaten up by undisclosed fees and other problems inherent to the system. In other words, seemingly respectable veteran newsman Bob Schieffer lied through his teeth for W.’s pet economic project---one that would have been a disaster had he been allowed to enact it.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200503110008

Here is how Mother Jones summed up the Bob Schieffer/George W. Bush axis of media bias.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/08/08_403.html

Last year, the "Face the Nation" host told Howard Kurtz, "It's always difficult to cover someone you know personally." Indeed, it must be. This is the same Bob Schieffer who believed that the media had asked "tough questions" during the run-up to the Iraq war. The same Bob Schieffer who, after the 2000 debates, opined, "Clearly tonight, if anyone gained from this debate it was George Bush—he seemed to have as much of a grasp of the issues ." The same Bob Schieffer who couldn't for the life of him figure out why Bush would visit the infamously racist Bob Jones University during the 2000 campaign, saying: "The notion that Bush is a Bible-thumping conservative Republican of that ilk is something that's sort of hard to believe."

II. Bob Schieffer Loves Him Some John McCain, Too

http://www.jedreport.com/2008/06/what-wesley-cla.html

Remember how outraged Bob Schieffer was when Gen Wesley Clarke said that being a fighter pilot and being shot down was not a qualification for being president? Did you know that Schieffer precipitated that remark by claiming that Obama is not qualified to be president because he was never a fighter pilot and was never shot down? Watch the video with analysis above.

Now check out this Media Matters link to see how Bob Schieffer exploited this interview with Clarke.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200808030001

SCHIEFFER: And yet, it has come to this: Obama's people trying to denigrate the war hero's military service, McCain's people comparing Obama to a couple of frivolous tarts.

Luckily, the American people are not as blinded by love as Bob Schieffer. They have been able to see where the negativity has come from---the John McCain Campaign---and they can see which campaign has continued to focus on the issues.

Speaking of the issues, remember when John McCain used to be for the rule of law and against torture? Then the Bush administration needed another “get tough on terra” vote in 2006 before the midterms---they called it the 2006 Military Commissions Act---and John McCain acted like a typical Republican lemming. From the Daily Howler link above:

Schieffer's interpretation of Senator McCain caving to the White House on the 2006 Military Commissions Act reveals not only a tendency to trust too much but a failure to verify or present the facts of this despotic legislation. The Military Commissions Act nullified habeas corpus and granted Bush the absolute power to devise his own definition of torture and to designate any American an "enemy combatant" that can be held indefinitely without charge. McCain, a former POW in Vietnam, knew this bill was window dressing, that torture, under another name - enhanced interrogation techniques - would continue. Presumably, Schieffer knew as well. Yet McCain, unconscionably, still went along with it. And Schieffer, certainly in one of his worst moments covering the Bush White House, told Americans:

SCHIEFFER: Senator McCain and the White House came together on a plan that ensures America will abide by the Geneva Conventions in dealing with enemy prisoners. It is not a perfect plan, to be sure, but it shows how we do things in a democracy -- out in the open and in accordance with the law, even when dealing with the worst of the worst.

In accordance with the law? I don’t think so. This act violated the U.S. Constitution. Who spoke out against the Act? Almost all the Congressional Democrats including Barack Obama:

http://obama.senate.gov/speech/060928-remarks_of_sena_9/

OBAMA: But politics won today. Politics won. The Administration got its vote, and now it will have its victory lap, and now they will be able to go out on the campaign trail and tell the American people that they were the ones who were tough on the terrorists.
And yet, we have a bill that gives the terrorist mastermind of 9/11 his day in court, but not the innocent people we may have accidentally rounded up and mistaken for terrorists - people who may stay in prison for the rest of their lives.

The ACLU also spoke out : http://www.aclu.org/safefree/detention/commissions.html

Habeas corpus isn't a fancy legal term. It's the freedom from being thrown in prison illegally, with no help and no end in sight. No president should ever be given the power to call someone an enemy, wave his hand, and lock them away indefinitely. The Founders made the president subject to the rule of law. They rejected dungeons and chose due process.
We all know the difference between fairness and persecution. If we do not act immediately to fix the Military Commissions Act and restore our constitutional rights, basic protections like habeas corpus could be lost forever, and our country would become unrecognizable.

McCain voted against Habeas Corpus---and Bob Schieffer applauded him for it. I have been waiting for any of the debate moderators to question McCain about that vote. I mean, if they are going to go after Obama for "palling around with a terrorist" they ought to ask John McCain why he changed his mind on torture, right? But all they do is lob soft balls about taxes. I guess spending five years in a box gives a presidential candidate a free pass when it comes to advocating torture. If he gets in office and starts measuring us for our own boxes, will the press continue to give him a free pass on the grounds that he understands what it is like to be a prisoner deprived of basic human rights? He feels our pain even as he inflicts it?

McCain’s latest move is to claim that he has no hand in the ugly, xenophobic violent mood that has come to dominate his recent campaign rallies. Cries of treason and kill him just sort of happen by themselves and have nothing to do with the staged inflammatory rhetoric, which I recently demonstrated follows the Adolph Hitler strategy as outlined in Mein Kamp to the letter----almost as if Sarah Palin has read the book or some simplified version of it which they pass around at Alaska secessionist meetings.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/313

Now, gambler McCain changes strategies the way that most people change their underwear. So, by next week, he may have moved on to some other sure fire long shot plan. But right now, based upon one widely reported episode in which he corrected a woman who called Obama an Arab, he is playing the victim of reverse discrimination at the hands of Rep. John Lewis. Ironically, he recently tried to cite Lewis as a mentor. Now, McCain has accused Lewis of verbal terrorism. That's right. McCain is doing exactly what Palin is doing. He is attempting to make a Black man---Rep. John Lewis--- scary . Even though all Lewis did was express fear that Palin had made it more likely that the nation's Blacks and Muslims might be the targets of violence.

This is a very old, very ugly southern political game which every person born south of the Maxon-Dixon line knows well. How scary it is when the victims of oppression try to defend themselves! Self defense isn't playing by the rules. Women and children and Latinos and Blacks are just supposed to bow their heads and take it when their masters decided to heap abuse on them and hope that their betters feel pangs of Christian remorse in their hearts which outweigh the monetary gains they feel in their pocketbooks from having a low cost work force. A woman who kills an abusive spouse or a minority who kills a white faces an extra long prison term in a place like Texas---where Bob Schieffer is from.

You can see the McCain campaign’s fingerprints in this Murdoch owned WSJ’s article about Lewis’s “Race Grenade” here http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122394063621930725.html?mod=googlenews_wsj )

Because of his civil-rights record, Mr. Lewis gets a pass from the media and his fellow politicians even when he makes incendiary comments.

Funny they should say that. Here is what Bob Shieffer (and others) have to say about the John McCain Campaign’s increasingly ugly campaign:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/10/media-mccain-attacks-obama/

CBS News’s Bob Schieffer: I’d like to think that maybe it’s not McCain himself, but some of those around him.

Is Schieffer paid to report the news the way he would like it to be? Apparently. If Schieffer is true to form, tomorrow night we can expect him to comment upon the way that both campaigns have turned negative, giving John McCain a platform from which to play outraged innocence (“Why you young whippersnapper, I spent the Vietnam War in a box to preserve your right to go to any school you wanted to and this is how you repay me!”).

Why do I worry about this? From the Media Matter link above:

SCHIEFFER: As I watch the latest back-and-forth over who did or did not inject race into the campaign, I thought back to the political consultant who once told me that he began each political cycle by rereading Machiavelli, who argued the only ethic that should matter to those seeking power was the ethic that benefited them. In other words, the end justified the means.

Now, if Schieffer is so blinded by love that he can not hold a grown man and Senator like John McCain accountable for what his own campaign does (”I’d like to think that maybe it’s not McCain himself, but some of those around him.”) then that means there is a very good chance he holds the Obama campaign accountable for 100% of the negativity, and he figures that McCain is doing what he has done only to defend himself. If true, Bob Schieffer has descended to the absolute depths of dualistic thinking, the dark pit where he thinks that he has identified absolute evil/danger/corruption and absolute goodness/purity/valor----and if he is put in a position to help out the cause of goodness, well, gosh darn, any blue blooded American is going to give it his best shot.

There is no room for absolutism in journalism. There is no room for wishful thinking. Sentimentality blinds a reporter. Bob Schieffer shows signs of all three. So keep your eye on him tomorrow. If he is lucky, he will have the sense to get someone else---and I do not mean the McCain camp--- to read over his list of questions before the debate to make sure that he has not allowed his own personal bias to affect his judgment.

III. John McCain “Pals Around” With a Viacom/CBS Lobbyist and Former Bush Ranger Wayne Berman

I have written extensively about how CBS sold its best reporter, Dan Rather and his team including Mary Mapes down the river in order to gain the favor of the Bush FCC. Viacom has been out of compliance with federal media ownership rules since 2000. Rather than sell off some of its holdings, it has been operating as FOX-Lite.

Many people know about this nasty tale already, since Dan Rather is suing. For those who do not, here is a journal I wrote with links:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3539083

Turns out that Sumner Redstone, Viacom and John McCain go way back, too. Those who have been reading my journals, know that when John McCain chaired the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation he never met a telecom for which he could not do a favor---for a price. Maybe this is how the press became his base.

http://projectusa.org/2008/01/28/viacom-decides-what-you-should-know/

Here is a touching little David vs. Goliath story about how a group tried to put up an anti-McCain billboard in Phoenix and how Viacom, which owned all the billboards in the area, shot them down.

In fact, Viacom was John McCain’s fourth largest source of campaign contributions that year.

Viacom always wants something each election season. Right now, they are suing YouTube, and they want to know what you watch on the internet. And they want your IP address.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-weinstein/viacom-versus-google-comi_b_111614.html

Guess who one of the Seven Most Powerful McCain Lobbyists represents. Wayne Berman: Viacom.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6040207/No-Reformer-McCains-Lobbyists

Here is more on the Viacom vs. Google lawsuit:

http://unrulymob.blogspot.com/2008/07/judge-orders-your-youtube-viewing.html

Note how lucky they were to get an industry friendly aging Reagan judge. Viacom has a vested interest in seeing someone who pals around with lobbyists appointing federal judges for the next four years. Also note that before Wayne Berman became one of John McCain’s favorite lobbyists to pal around with, he was a major Bush supporter, raising a quarter of a million dollars for him. And his wife is a social secretary at the White House.

The moral here is that if Viacom/CBS/Comedy Central is going to start an internet empire and know who you are and where you live (on the internet) they need John McCain to restack the courts with Federalist judges and veto industry unfriendly Congressional bills and appoint someone with Viacom’s best interests at heart to the FCC.

And we all know that John McCain always delivers service in exchange for lobbyist’s dollars.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/311

I think we know which candidate CBS is rooting for this Wednesday.