While CBS News
reporter Sharyl Attkisson attends the far-right
Conservative Political Action Conference this week to accept an award from the
far-far-right group, Accuracy In Media, perhaps she will have extra time to take
in some of the discussions scheduled to take place.
According to the posted agenda,
these will be among the CPAC offerings Attkisson could sit in on:
-"How the
Liberal Mob is Endangering America"
-"Injustice: Exposing
the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department"
-"Obama vs. The
Constitution: How a Harvard Law Graduate President Is Shredding the
Constitution"
Fascinating topics, no doubt.
Of course, last year CPAC made news when it banned the conservative gay group, GOProud, from being a conference sponsor in 2012. GOProud's inclusion in 2011 prompted angry boycotts from social conservative groups. AIM itself has a long and disturbing history of publishing columns condemning gays and their "sympathizers" as subversive agents of death.
There really is no cockamamie conspiracy AIM hasn't pursued over the years, including its pathetic attempts to promote the "cover-up" surrounding the death of Clinton aide Vince Foster.
Which reminds me, when Attkisson has finished her ten-minute
award ceremony remarks for the appreciative CPAC audience, maybe she'll get a chance to ask Cliff
Kincaid, director of AIM's Center for Investigative Journalism, about all the
reporting he's done on President Obama's birth certificate.
In case Attkisson hasn't had time to read up,
here's a sample of Kincaid's penetrating birther analysis:
-"By releasing a copy of my own birth certificate, I have tried to demonstrate what other necessary information is lacking about Obama's birth."
- "The contrast between what is on so many birth
certificates for ordinary Americans, such as mine, versus what the Obama
campaign has released, is striking."
-" The
only way to address these questions is to identify where exactly he was born,
in what hospital, and what doctor was present."
-"Anybody who has an original copy of their own birth certificate, or a certified copy of their own original birth certificate, should immediately understand that the Obama version is lacking in basic information that should be publicly available."
You get the idea, even if CBS News does not: Sending a straight news reporter to an Obama-bashing conference to receive an award from
a proud birther organization is a very, very bad idea, and one that will do
needless damage to CBS' reputation.
As Media Matters accurately noted this
week, AIM represents a "cesspool of hate and conspiracy theories." That's not
hyperbole. That's the documented truth; go read for yourself.
So that's a problem
in terms of CBS News maintaining its reputation as an honest news broker. But that's not all.
When you add onto that the myriad of loony conspiracy theories that AIM has pushed, the
Attkisson decision makes even less sense. And when you top it off with the
fact that AIM represented an engine that helped drive the blind idiocy
behind the birther charade, then you really
have to wonder what CBS News is trying to accomplish this week at CPAC.
According to a
network spokesperson, "CBS News journalists are regularly
honored by a broad spectrum of organizations for their outstanding original
reporting." That makes sense and I'm sure it's true. But at some point common
sense ought to come into play.
Here's a simple,
hypothetical question for CBS News executives: Eight years ago, would you have allowed a straight
news reporter to accept an award from a radical left-wing group that dedicated
untold hours trying to document how the Bush administration was behind the
9/11 attacks? And would you have allowed your straight news reporter to receive
the award, and to address an appreciative crowd, at a national conclave of
Bush-hating nut jobs?
I didn't think so.