Minus 60 Minutes and Not Counting; Dan Rather and Mary Mapes mistakenly receive "Peabody" Award rather than "PeeBuddy" Awards for how they targeted Pentagon in segment on Abu Ghraib.

May 19, 2005--

Minus 60 Minutes and Not Counting; Dan Rather and Mary Mapes mistakenly receive "Peabody" Award rather than "PeeBuddy" Awards for how they targeted Pentagon in segment on Abu Ghraib.

According to a May 18, 2005, AP report, CBS has decided to cancel "60 Minutes II." That AP report says, "The show was [Dan] Rather's home base since he stepped down as anchor of the 'CBS Evening News' in March. While he will report for '60 Minutes,' it's not clear whether he will become one of the correspondents pictured every week at the beginning of the show."

Coincidentally (?), on May 17, 2005, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes attended an awards ceremony at which the "60 Minutes II" broadcast in May, 2004 ( on which they collaborated) about Abu Ghraib mistakenly received a "Peabody Award." The award each of them actually earned was a "PeeBuddy" Award, which more aptly and metaphorically describes how their broadcast about Abu Ghraib targeted the Pentagon despite an earnest plea by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers for "more time" for the military to complete ongoing, sensitive investigations into allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Rather's and Mapes' insistence on reporting on the matter while the investigations were on-going and while our troops were in an unusually dangerous situation in Iraq led to the matter being blown far out of proportion and even equated by the likes of Teddy Kennedy with the barbaric torture applied there under Saddam Hussein. Kennedy characterized the situation at Abu Ghraib under American military control as "same methods, new management." For Kennedy to have equated the untypical instances of American military personnel's mistreatment of prisoners with the systematic, pervasive and barbaric torture routinely dispensed at Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein's regime was far worse than to equate a minor traffic offense with Chappaquiddick.

So many in the dominant media still don't get it-- i.e., that we're at war with a network of fanatical adherents to a barbaric, medieval form of totalitarianism rather than merely involved in "law enforcement" activities to be conducted according to the niceties of the criminal-litigation process rather than rules of war. We're lucky that the generation of reporters controlling the media during World War II exercised better judgment.

--Jim Wrenn, Editor at PoliSat.Com.

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