More C-BS

Reid Collin of AIM has insight into the Roger Mudd interview of Former CBS News Correspondent Tom Fenton, shown on C-SPAN's BookTV on Sunday. It's full of those insider stories about how Roger Mudd was beaten out from the job of filling Walter Cronkite's chair by Dan Rather but says absolutely nothing about the interview itself.

Fenton contends that CBS, like the CIA, had abandoned their news collection in the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's his view that this is what is wrong with CBS. Not bias, not intent.

The truth is that long before the 2000 merger of CBS corporation and Viacom, CBS was not reporting the news and it had little to do with lack of overseas personnel.

Since the early 1970s when Yassir Arafat emerged after a decade of systematic assassination of his rivals, CBS has, like the other alphabet networks, carefully avoided branding him the terrorist he was. Thirty-five years on, they still referred to him as a "statesman", despite ample evidence that he was a gangster and a thug and a murderer. So what does that make them? Frankly, it makes them the same collaborationists who looked on the Soviet Union as an experiment in utopianism that resulted in cracking some 30 million eggs, eggs that happed to be human lives washed down the drain in an appalling act of insanity that was echoed by another Marxist maniac, Pol Pot, who still is referred to as a "leader" without the reference to the Marxism. Then there is Marxist Robert Mugabe and the Marxist Idi Amin, all certifiable nut case murderers, all embraced as was Stalin, by our MSM.

Our MSM didn't dismantle their foreign bureaus. Once they had achieved a monopoly on information and a consolidation of newspapers so they had no competition, they no longer had to pretend to be a news gathering entity. They could just print the party line as straight news. They have done so for more than 30 years. That's why the talk of foreign bureaus and reporters is so laughable. Not since Robert Trout reported fluff pieces from Paris, has a single foreign reporter at CBS has a single bit of credibility. It's just an elaborate ruse to convince you that it's the corporate moneybags who are responsible, not the ethos at the MSM that embraces terrorists and Marxists and hates America nearly as much as your average rabid Socialist Frenchman.

The pity is that the interview was just a fluff piece to try to sell a book. One colleague interviewing another, the favor no doubt returned at a later date. It was as empty as CBS, ABC, and NBC have been of morals and decency for most of our lifetime.