If you were able to stomach it, watching the 60 minutes segment was like watching a commercial for the DNC.
Newsbusters.org: While a story on Sunday’s 60 Minutes about the new book, ‘Game Change,’ about the 2008 campaign,
focused heavily on attacks against Sarah Palin by McCain staffers, it
ignored numerous revelations of controversial statements by prominent Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid describing Barack Obama as “light skinned” and lacking a “negro dialect.”
Acting as a guest correspondent, CNN’s Anderson Cooper cited the book’s liberal authors, New York magazine’s John Heilemann and Time’s Mark Halperin, who claimed that Palin was picked by the McCain campaign out of “desperation” after manager Rick Davis found her name on Google. At one point, Halperin went so far as to declare that: “They said, ‘there’s one Sarah who you see in public’– upbeat. But the other Sarah was the one that frightened them. It was someone whose eyes were kind of glazed over, who was literally not responding to questions, who was keeping her head down.”
Cooper made sure to highlight CBS’s role in Palin’s supposed downfall with the Evening News Katie Couric interview: “In her book,
Palin accuses CBS News of editing the interview to make her look bad. But [McCain campaign advisor] Steve Schmidt told us Palin did poorly because she didn’t do her homework.” Schmidt slammed Palin, claiming she was “focused that morning on answering ten written questions from a small newspaper in Alaska called the ‘Matsu Valley Frontiersman.’” After Cooper mentioned Palin’s criticism of Couric’s “gotcha questions,”
Schmidt proclaimed: “I don’t think that Katie Couric asked a single unfair question in that interview.”
The story briefly turned to the book’s detailing of problems on the Democratic side, mentioning Hillary Clinton’s surprise at being overtaken by Obama in the primaries as well as her concern that husband Bill Clinton would be an embarrassment if she were to be named secretary of state in the Obama administration. However, a controversial comment made by the former president that Obama would have “been getting them coffee” a few years before he decided to run in 2008 was not mentioned.
Also missing was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s controversial comment suggesting Obama would do well in the campaign because he was “light skinned” and did not have a “negro dialect.” In addition, there was no mention of the book’s discussion of the strained marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards amid the Senator’s affair.
Near the end of the segment, Cooper concluded: “Schmidt now believes, if Palin is the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, it’ll be catastrophic for the party, even though he’s one of those most responsible for making her a national figure.” No such dire conclusion was made about any Democratic political figures.
In an article today,
John Ziegler, producer of the documentary film Media Malpractice wrote;
"This was the worst piece of “journalism” I have ever witnessed on 60 Minutes."
He went on to break down the time devoted to bashing Sarah Palin on the hit piece.
The segment on the book was just under thirteen minutes long. About eleven of those were spent discussing the losing side’s Vice Presidential candidate. About seven minutes were used interviewing the strategist for the losing the campaign and allowing him to take unsubstantiated pot shots at the aforementioned VP candidate. Less than two minutes was used on the current Secretary of State’s bid to be the actual President. Virtually zero seconds were given to the campaign of the current President. Literally zero seconds were devoted to brand new and startling revelations in “Game Change” regarding scandals involving John and Elizabeth Edwards and Harry Reid.
FOX news contacted 60 Minutes for comments on why the segment completely ignored the controversy over Harry Reid's racist remarks. Producers responded that they wanted to focus on what was more newsworthy.
So there you have it. The Democratic Party can sleep well knowing that CBS is still firmly in the tank for the Party they sold their journalistic integrity to support. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Posted by Cecilia Trent
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