-- On 11 Dec 2001, at 12:20, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Well, by your standards, any journalist who makes an innocent mistake would be a liar.
CNN edited interviews with people so as to make them appear to admit to war crimes commited against civilians during the Vietnam war, when the full transcript showed no such admissions. Those people threatened to sue. CNN then paid those people large sums of money in settlement of threatened libel suits. Under America's extremely liberal libel laws, CNN would not have done so unless those defamed had a good case of malicious libel.
I think the truth is that the reporters honestly believed they had a solid story
If they believed that, why then did they falsify the interviews? The reporters may well have honestly believed that the US used nerve gas to massacre civilians during the Vietnam war, but they did not believe they had evidence for this that they could show to the public. So their perhaps honestly held beliefs justified them in their own minds, in lying to the public, in fabricating evidence that they did not possess. If that was their rationalization then this was a classic example of the vision of the anointed. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG BTQftYHIf8GtXCl4n9FZfxmMwvBd3TChGeVZEFDC 4n0C1INs3LyzmQTF0zJYUiz0kZ7tFH7DNS1G9gLm5