CBS Does McCain's Bidding on Russia, Edwards Stories
In ways large and small, CBS News continues to offer John McCain's presidential campaign a helping hand. Less than a month after Katie Couric edited out McCain's shocking confusion over the timeline of the surge in Iraq, CBS News on Monday featured Robert Kagan, not identified as McCain foreign policy adviser, as its lone analyst in a segment on the conflict in Georgia. And that came just days after CBS assessed the impact of the John Edwards' affair not on the admitted adulterer McCain, but on the Democratic Party.
On Monday night, CBS News reporter Wyatt Andrews featured Robert Kagan in a segment describing Russia's ambitions in - and beyond - Georgia. But whereas the New York Times, Charlie Rose and virtually the entire media this week identified Kagan both as "a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a top McCain foreign policy adviser," CBS described its source for perspective and analysis as merely "a political analyst":
"We have to understand, these Russian troops didn't materialize out of nowhere," said political analyst Robert Kagen [sic]. "This is the culmination of Putin's efforts to pull Georgia back within Russia's sphere and exert control over it."
(It is worth noting that the Washington Post, too, makes no mention of its columnist Kagan's affiliation with the McCain campaign at the end of his August 11th piece, "Putin Makes His Move.)
On Saturday, CBS did more favors for the McCain campaign. Anchor Russ Mitchell led with a segment on the scandal surrounding John Edwards' admission of a 2006 affair with Rielle Hunter. But ignoring the obvious parallels between Edwards' betrayal of his ill-wife on one hand and those of Republicans John McCain and Newt Gingrich on the other, Mitchell predictably asked colleague Bob Schieffer about the damage to Democrats' electoral prospects. The CBS web site teases their exchange:
"CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer speaks with Russ Mitchell about John Edward's extramarital affair and what this could mean for the Democratic Party."
McCain, after all, began his affair with Cindy Hensley, now the second Mrs. McCain, months before divorcing Carol Shepp, the first Mrs. McCain. (As Salon and the Daily Mail each noted, McCain's first wife was still coping with the injuries she had suffered in a serious car accident.) And to be sure, for all his faults, John Edwards did not commit the "full Gingrich" by divorcing his cancer-stricken wife. For his part, Gingrich is a serial philanderer, dumping wife #2 in 2000 for a young Congressional aide, Callista Bisek. Yet Gingrich did not merely entertain a 2008 presidential bid, he was back on Capitol Hill last week as part of another threatened government shutdown (this time over offshore drilling) by his Republican allies.
For its part, ABC News on Tuesday offered a piece titled "Cheating on a Sick Spouse," which appropriately began:
John McCain. Then Newt Gingrich. And now John Edwards.
But not CBS. There, John Edwards' infidelity and shameless lying is a reflection on his Democratic Party, not a reminder of deeply flawed - and eerily similar - Republicans past and present. And McCain foreign policy adviser and neocon hardliner Robert Kagan is just "a political analyst."
|
No Comments
Post a comment