They had "myopic zeal," all right. Myopic zeal to see John Kerry elected.

If it was only myopic zeal for a story, there were plenty of other much better documented and valid stories about which to be myopically zealous, including Christmas in Cambodia, earning a medal for cutting and running, less-than-honorable discharges...the list goes on. They could have had a scoop on those, since no other MSM organization wanted to pursue them either.

But for some reason their "myopic zeal" was confined to only one candidate, just weeks before the election. To think that there was no political bias here would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.

So I read the document, and finally get to page 216, where we learn exactly what was "news" in the 60 minutes story.

This is something to have "myopic zeal" over?

A commander reportedly gives an order, its not followed, the strongest punishment for failure to obey a direct order is to give Bush exactly what he wanted. I don't think LtCol Killian would be upset about "sugar coating" the evaluation, he should be pissed that his authority was meaningless. If all that was reported was true...

INSTAPUNDIT linked to and excerpted a bit from Jim Geraghty of NRO's "TKS":

"Does the panel really think that CBS would have acted in the same manner in a seemingly-great story that would have hurt John Kerry? Are we really to believe that it was solely “competitive pressures” that led to this, and that no one in this process had their thinking influenced by a desire to see Bush defeated in this year’s election?"

Well Glenn, Jim: I DO believe that there were more, MUCH more "competitive pressures" on CBS to "get" Bush than to "get Kerry;" after all: NOT A SINGLE CBS "OLD MEDIA" COMPETITOR WAS GOING AFTER KERRY, OR GOING TO GO AFTER KERRY! Heh.

There is a good way to turn the panel's assertion that they found "no evidence of political bias" on its head. Ask a simple question: is it believable that a CBS producer would have put a member of the BUSH campaign team in contact with someone possessing damaging information on Kerry?

(I'll wait until you stop laughing.)

That was a political statement. The report does have comments that STRONGLY suggest they are talking about political bias - look at comments about Mapes' phone call and where she found the links to the memos in the first place.

One thing is clear: Mapes is in complete and total denial. This is actually much worse than political bias. She still doesn't realize she did anything wrong. See here:

Mapes' Statement

If I hadn't read it, I wouldn't believe it.

Scroll up a bit on the link. I managed to include the "comments" tag on that.

I'd think Bush supporters would be eternally grateful to CBS. Their myopic zeal ended up removing the focus from his actual war-time record completely. CBS's mistake trumped even the most deft information engineering efforts of Fox news.

I think the Rather-gate forgeries were done by the same people who did the Niger "yellowcake to Saddam" forgeries.

http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/003654.html