For a couple of weeks now, the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather has featured a daily "CBS News" tribute to a fallen American soldier in Iraq.
The soldiers’ sacrifices are immense. Even Americans who oppose the war should honor them. I see no reason, for example, why CBS News cannot help the soldiers' families financially.
But these tributes do not belong in a news program. They are not news. They are politics.
Their purpose is to tell viewers that CBS News is patriotic. After all, many Americans watching the terrible stories out of Iraq and Washington might well think it's those liberals at CBS at it again. Wasn't CBS's 60 Minutes II the first to air the images of US troops brutalizing Iraqi prisoners? You see?
No, the CBS News tributes have nothing to do with news and everything to do with protecting the network from the Bush White House and the right-wing apparatus it commands.
There is nothing new here. It is what CBS and ABC and NBC have been doing, sometimes subtly and sometimes brazenly, since 9/11.
What shall we call it? Capitulation? Appeasement?. Protecting the franchise?
All of those things, I suppose. And shameful.