Reason for airing forged Bush documents

My first reaction to CBS’s airing (and subsequent recanting) of the forged Bush National Guard documents was that someone in CBS must have done it deliberately. Nothing like that could ever get by both the newspeople and the CBS lawyers. Did CBS want to air (and then retract) the forged documents to get the issue off of Bush’s back? That sounded too crazy to be true. I asked an expert in the area of telecommunications regulation what incentive would link CBS and Bush and the reply was that Bush would clearly be preferred by Viacom (the owner of CBS) and that they would not prefer Kerry.

Now we get a report from FAIR that CBS will shelve a report very critical of the Bush administration (the Niger uranium issue) and that Viacom Chairman Summer Redstone has openly endorsed Bush for President–“from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.” How convenient!

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3:37 pm on September 28, 2004