NEW YORK (APUPI) After several months, many thousands of legal hours billed, and several barrels of latte consumed, the independent report on CBS’ flawed reporting of the Emperor’s new clothes has been released, to the relief of network executives who feared much worse. While several producers have been asked to resign, Dan Rather will continue to report on Imperial fashion, and the report verified that the story may still have been fake, but accurate.
The network had previously reported that the Emperor had a new wardrobe, and provided footage of him walking down the street in it, waving to the crowds. But after a little boy at the anti-Imperial Free Republic website pointed out that the Emperor was, in fact, dressed only in his birthday suit, a media storm broke out over the apparent controversy, putting Dan Rather and his network on the defensive, and resulting in the appointment of an independent commission to discover how such apparent misreporting had happened.
The commission got quickly to work, and investigated the situation in great depth, carefully examining the footage themselves, and visited web sites in which several bloggers had taken pictures of themselves with and without clothing, to demonstrate the difference. They also spent many exhaustive hours viewing and documenting scholarly sites on the internet, as other potential examples of clothesless individuals for comparison.
In addition, they interviewed several clothing experts, one of whom demonstrated himself in a full flesh-colored body suit to show how one could appear to be naked while fully clothed. A self-proclaimed professor of Nude Queer Theory at Berkeley even wrote a dissertation on how it was possible, and even likely, for homophobic audiences to fantasize a nude Emperor out of subliminal fear of the power of the nude male body. This study was roundly criticized by numerous bloggers, particularly when it was revealed that he had no actual credentials other than occasional weekends at nude beaches in Santa Cruz. In any event, it should be noted that no one so far has been able to produce a body suit that exactly replicates the nude look in the same manner as simply taking off one’s clothes.
According to the report “…after a thorough scrutiny of the footage of the Emperor’s march down the street, it’s impossible to find the slightest shred of clothing on him. Closeups show every pore and wrinkle on his body. Moles and other imperfections displayed on the Imperial body during the parade appear to match exactly royal medical records reluctantly supplied to this commission by the palace physician.”
The report continues, “…nonetheless, some experts claim that it’s possible to be fully garbed and yet appear to be naked, and in the face of conflicting data, we will probably never be able to know for certain whether or not he indeed was wearing any clothes.”
The report added, as additional and similar examples of the evidentiary state, that it is similarly impossible to authenticate with certainty whether or not O. J. Simpson murdered his wife, or Americans walked on the moon in 1969, or even whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow.
In addition, despite the fact that the producer of the program coordinated closely with the Imperial clothing industry in the production of the story, including breathless emails that said “I’d give anything to show how fabulous these new clothes are, and show up those skinflints who think that an Imperial wardrobe is a waste of taxpayer funds,” and a bumper sticker on her car saying “End Second-Class Royal Threads!,” there was no obvious political motivation for the rush to air of the parade.
Beleaguered CBS anchorman Dan Rather took the report as vindication as well. “If it ever, improbably, turns out that the Emperor really wasn’t wearing any clothes, I want to be the one to break that story,” he exclaimed. “I’d be as anxious as an armadillo in a flak-jacket factory to get that story out.”