Truth Tellers Will be Punished

Greg Palast blasts CBS for its craven backdown on the AWOL story. I said earlier that was probably the lamest expose I'd ever seen on "60 Minutes," and I still think so. If anything, the stuff they showed weakened the solid case that Bush dodged Vietnam with the aid of wealthy family friends--and that was even before the hounding and backtracking started. The "revelations" just weren't much, and their authenticity seemed doubtful, even just watching the show. As such, I thought that the show made little difference one way or the other--one tiny bit of shaky evidence matters little when there are mountains of solid evidence available.

But Palast points out that the people fired weren't fired for this lame "60 Minutes" segment. Like WMD's in Iraq, that was just the cover story. One of the fired execs was "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes, who produced the Abu Ghraib story last spring. Mapes wasn't fired for running a lame story with questionable evidence--she was fired for running a massive scandal story with unimpeachable evidence. They just had to wait a bit for her to slip up a little on something else before the hammer came down.

[Update] The WSWS weighs in on the CBS story.