Can You Prove It Now?

It's like the Verizon guy's "Can you hear me now? ... Can you hear me now?" We keep proving and reproving the existence of a leftist bias in MSM but we're just asked to prove it again, and again. Can you prove it now?

Charles Krauthammer comes about as close as anyone on the Rather affair in his WashPost column today. (Interestingly, the WashPost and NYTimes still have not run post-Thornburgh editorials.) The key paragraphs:

The investigation does note that the show's producer called Joe Lockhart of the Kerry campaign to alert him to the story and to urge him to contact the purveyor of the incriminating documents. It concludes that this constitutes an "appearance of political bias." What would producer Mary Mapes have had to do to go beyond appearance? Show up at the Kerry headquarters?

CBS had been pursuing the story for five years. Five years! The Manhattan Project took three. Five years for a minor episode in a 30-year-old byway in the life of the president? This story had been vetted not only in two Texas gubernatorial races but twice more by the national media, once in 2000 and then yet again earlier in 2004 when Michael Moore's "deserter" charge and Terry McAuliffe's "AWOL" charge touched off a media frenzy that culminated in a Newsweek cover.

To what, then, does the report attribute Mapes's great-white-whale obsession with the story? Her Texas roots. I kid you not. She comes from Texas and likes Texas stories. You believe that and you will believe that a 1972 typewriter can tuck the letter "i" right up against the umbrella of the letter "f" (as can Microsoft Word).

Read the whole delightful thing here.