Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Boycott CBS

Rich Galen

Wednesday October 27, 2004

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The New York Times and CBS News have been caught attempting to influence the outcome of the Presidential election by the nature and the timing of a story out of Iraq. At a minimum, the story was to be disturbing. At a maximum it was timed to be devastating to the campaign of President Bush.

Briefly, the New York Times ran a story about a gillion tons of high explosives having disappeared from a storage facility in Iraq. The piece indicated it had been stolen sometime after the coalition forces had taken control of Iraq which John Kerry jumped on as "proof" of the President's mis-handling of Iraq.

Unfortunately for the Times and Kerry, NBC reminded everyone that it had an embedded reporter who had said there was "no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives."

According to the MSNBC website, "Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who was embedded with the Army's 101st Airborne, Second Brigade, said Tuesday on MSNBC TV that the news team stayed at the Al-Qaqaa base for about 24 hours."

That's not all. CBS - the network of Dan Rather and Joe Lockhart - had planned to hold the story until this coming Sunday night when they were to have released this blockbuster news 48 hours before the election.

According to a statement reported in the Los Angeles Times, 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager said, "our plan was to run the story on October 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold..."

Drat. I hate when you have a great plot and it gets hatched before you're ready.

CBS is now oh-for-two in unsuccessfully attempting to unfairly influence this election campaign against President Bush.

The Sunday 60 Minutes crew, remember, loudly protested that they would never have fallen for those forged documents the way the mid-week 60 Minutes goofballs did. No sireebob. The Sunday 60 Minutes geniuses, however, fell like a drunk in a barrel over Niagara Falls for repackaging this story which was first broadcast in APRIL 2003.

The howls of protest against Sinclair Broadcasting over whether they were unfairly attempting to harm Senator Kerry are - surprise! - not being reprised against CBS.

Here's what we should do: Boycott CBS.

You can't make much headway boycotting a network. But you can make a big dent boycotting a network's local affiliate.

So, let's do that. Boycott your local CBS affiliate. Here are some action steps:

1. Do not watch any local programming on your local CBS affiliate. This is most likely to be the local news. The CBS, ABC, and Fox affiliates are using just about the same weather information; they're using the same traffic information; and they are watching the same local sporting events.
2. Call or write the general manager of your local CBS affiliate and tell him or her that you are taking this action to protest the network's shocking behavior regarding this campaign.
3. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper to inform your neighbors that you are taking this action in defense of a fair and impartial media.
4. Call your local radio station and tell them you are doing this.
5. If you do (3) and (4) the other network affiliates will get the joke and will probably help make the CBS affiliate feel uncomfortable. They might even help out by contacting the CBS affiliate's sponsors and suggesting they move their advertising money away from the CBS station because of the alarming drop in viewership.
6. Send this to every person in your contacts list and ask them to do the same things - same letters, same phone calls, same forwarding.
7. If you come up with some other ideas - legal ideas - send them to me and I'll pass them along.

Boycotting the New York Times is not a bad idea either, but I suspect there are not many of you are getting the New York Times delivered to their doorstep to start with.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the NY Times story and a link to the Los Angeles Times' reporting on the CBS involvement; a nice Mullfoto, a typical Kerry Katchy Kaption of the Day, and an explanation of those MTV awards.

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