Saturday, September 18, 2004

Deep breath, now

With an arrogant and clearly wrong-sided CBS now being hammered by bloggers sensing blood in the water, it's time for a little reality check: Is CBS going to stop doing news? No. Is Rather going to retire from all the embarrassment? Nope.

Ever wonder why CBS is digging its heals in? Probably a combination of it's inability to take the bloggers seriously (which only makes the right-leaning bloggers call for heads to roll) and the fact that bloggers are giving them no out.

Many, many bloggers are calling for nothing less than CBS to simply shutter it's News Division. While much of that might be overblown rhetoric, I find that when one person doesn't give the other an "out" when the other is wrong (that is, some very tiny shred of dignity upon which to rest a conclusion and transition) the other is just as apt to dig their heels in and make the situation worse. And why not? What have they got to lose.

CBS is clearly wrong. And their attitude compounded the problem. Are we going to learn anything new here about those documents by continuing to hound CBS? Nope.