[extropy-chat] Moveon.org

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> OK my friends, I partially disqualify my own
> conclusions
> because I have been deeply suspicious of Dan Rather
> and
> 60 Minutes for a long time.  For those of you who
> consider
> yourselves neutral or nearly so, what is your take? 
> Forget
> for the moment that one candidate or another may or
> may
> not have been helped or harmed; that is almost
> beside the
> point.  This question is about mainstream news
> media.

I'll admit I haven't heard all the evidence, but from
what I have heard, there was at least some honest
error.  *Someone* probably crafted the document with
malice in mind, but it's difficult to say who:
someone associated with the media just wanting to
create a story (in which case the poor forgery could
have been intentional, to create another story),
someone who wanted to see Bush get it, or someone who
deliberately created a low-quality forgery and planted
it so that the Kerry crowd would seem desparate.
There are people in all three camps with enough motive
and low enough morals to do such a deed.

That said, it was irresponsible of Rather et al to
run it without doing a bit more checking.  Whether
that irresponsibility came from partisanship or from
fever to run a story is another question, but whatever
the emotions responsible, they got in the way of
professional logic.