CBS Purge

Today CBS, in a broad mea culpa gesture, fired four people involved in the Sixty Minutes segment on Bush's National Guard service. Here the network attempts to salvage its news department's reputation by holding people accountable for bad journalism.

Gee whiz! Imagine if the Bush administration demonstrated a comparable level of accountability! For example, what if it held people accountable for the WMD fiasco, or the Abu Ghraib torture scandal? A deafening silence would descend upon the West Wing, upon certain corridors of the Pentagon -- given the sudden absence of the many individuals responsible.

I guess the difference is that the Fourth Estate is willing to admit that it is capable of making mistakes, whereas the Bush administration, as we all learned during the presidental debates, is mistake-proof.

The real news, of course, is that the administration secretly paid the right-wing editorialist Armstrong Williams a quarter of a million dollars (this tax dollars, by the way) to promote its No Child Left Behind program. So much for independent journalism. Psyops targeting, not the Iraqi people, but the American.