LA Times learns wrong lesson from CBS

The LA Times has published an editorial on the CBS fiasco with this gem of a paragraph.

Maybe Rather got off easy in being allowed to honorably step down from his chair but retain a high-visibility reporting job. That might be distressing if we didn't think "reporting" would mean something different for him from now on. Then again, maybe Fox News should have inspected its acceptance of dubious anti-John Kerry allegations from the Swift boat veterans group. CBS at least investigated the forces that harmed its news-gathering.

Here the editors are repeating a lie. The Swift Vets claims against John Kerry were not dubious and many were proven correct. John Kerry was not in Cambodia as he claimed before the Senate. Kerry and his biographer were caught in many fabrications relating to Vietnam that needed to be corrected.

To compound their lie they blame Fox as credulous suckers who fell for the Swift Vets "allegations". I saw several interviews of the Swift Vets on Fox and they were not treated with kid gloves. In fact, O'Reilly was doing an attack job on the Swift Vets. As I watched these ill prepared interviews by O'Reilly I could only shake my head. It was obvious he had never even read Unfit for Command. If anything Fox was too skeptical.

There was nothing to investigate at Fox so no wonder they didn't take action. There is nothing noble about the CBS investigation since it didn't happen until it was obvious that Rather and his cronies had tried to throw an election. The end result of the investigation being a whitewash that never even admitted the fact that the memos were forgeries.

So we see that the LA Times has not learned a thing from CBSs travails. They continue to prevaricate in hopes that they can confuse their readers into accepting their partisan political positions. Michael Kinsley and the rest of the editors who contributed to this should have "Liar" tattooed on their foreheads.