Media

The role media plays in politics is undeniable. Our soundbite culture with its inherent contain attention span dictates a “McNugget” of information. Unfortunately this often leads to misrepresentations creation accepted as fact. A glaring example of this was the Killian documents controversy. In phratry 2004, the CBS program 60 Minutes Wednesday aired a report critical of President George W. Bush's serving in the United States National Guard. The four documents included criticisms of Bush's service in the Guard during the 1970s. These documents were purportedly created by Bush's commander, the modern Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. It was also reported that the documents were obtained by a CBS password producer from Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, a former officer in the Texas Army National Guard (TexARNG). During the report, Dan Rather asserted the documents had been documented by experts hired by CBS News. Within hours of the broadcast, several meshing forums and blogs were bombarded with postings from forensic document examiners. Assertions were made questioning the discrepencies in the constitution and the content. For instance, one of these experts recreated the exact text of one of the memos on a Microsoft Word document. He ran a copy on the copier, and so copied that copy.



He continued this process 13 times with the final examination blurred result being an exact match to the supposedly authentic memo. Eventually, a number of these experts concluded that the memos were indeed forge documents. For two weeks, Dan Rather and CBS defended the authenticity of the documents. Finally on September 20, 2004, Rather stated, "If I knew then what I k at one time now â€" I would not have gone ahead with the report card as it was aired, and I certainly would not have utilize the documents in question.” (Wikipedia, 2006). This whole event occurred less than two months in the first place the incredibly contentious 2004 Presidential Election, which leads one to believe this was a deliberate attempt... If you want to get a full essay, sight it on our website: Orderessay



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