By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--October 28, 2014
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failed to answer repeated phone calls or an e-mail seeking comment. A secretary for David Rhodes, president of CBS News, immediately volleyed a Post reporter’s phone call to company spokeswoman Sonya McNail. Before the reporter could even ask a question, McNair curtly said, “We decline to comment. Thank you. Bye.”
Moonves “Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley’s assistant did not respond to numerous e-mails, and he didn’t return a call to his office. Attkisson said in her book that under Pelley’s leadership at “Evening News,” her investigative pieces began getting killed regularly. Former “Evening News’’ Executive Producer Patricia Shevlin, now a producer at “60 Minutes,” also didn’t return a call, with the CBS operator saying the top exec was too busy to talk to The Post. Attkisson has claimed that after she complained that the network shelved several of her reports on Solyndra — the Obama-supporting green-energy firm that went bankrupt despite hundreds of millions of dollars in government handouts — Shevlin replied, “What’s the matter, don’t you support green energy?”I've spent enough time in newsrooms to recognize a lot of this. Of course, news reporters have biases like everyone else, and the vast majority of them are definitely liberal. They don't think of themselves as propagandists, of course, and in their own minds they simply think they're exercising news judgment when they pursue certain stories and ignore others. But what they don't admit even to themselves, let alone to others, is that their ideological biases absolutely influence that news judgment. When they don't hear anyone but right-wingers talking about Benghazi, for instance, they file it away as a right-wing narrative - and that's very different from a real news story. If they go to town covering a story like that, their beat reporters are going to hear about it from other journos at the next press conference or council meeting, and they'll come back to the newsroom pissed because they don't appreciate being put in a position to defend why their station, network or paper is starting to sound like Fox News. Do editors think about stuff like this when they make decisions about stories? They absolutely do, although they will never admit it. Attkisson's news judgment was clearly not aligned with the prevailing culture of the newsroom, and I'm sure she realized it. I'm just as sure that the resistance and blowback she got for her stories didn't really surprise her all that much. She knows what CBS News is. She worked there 20 years. I'm sure she realized that if she kept pushing stories like this it would reach the point where the organization would simply start rejecting her. I'm not faulting her for trying. She was fighting the good fight. But she probably always realized that at some point she would end up walking away - and maybe writing a book. The funniest thing about this is that, if CBS was covering a story about someone else accused of some sort of wrongdoing, they would be all over the party for not returning reporters' phone calls or ignoring e-mails. But when it's them? No comment!
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