CBS' Attkisson, pushing Benghazi story, fell for Fast and Furious and anti-vaccine scam too [View all]

[muriel_volestrangler]

Charles Pierce is not impressed by her journalism, or a puff piece on her in the Washington Post:

Well, it seems that B, B!, B! may have its own Chris Vlasto, and her name is Sharyl Attkisson, and she works for CBS News, and she is the subject of a very weird profile today by Paul Farhi in The Washington Post — a piece best read between the lines. On the surface, it reads as though Atkisson is a lonely seeker of truth in a hard and truthless land. However, read closely, she comes across as something of an ideologue and, frankly, quite the sucker.

In 2011, she told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham that she was on the receiving end of a heated scolding by the Justice Department's chief spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, and White House spokesman Eric Schultz over her reporting on Fast and Furious.

Yes, because if I want to defend my bona fides as a journalist, Laura Ingraham's my go-to gal. Yeesh.

Some of Attkisson's most controversial reporting hasn't been about politics at all. She has been widely criticized within medical-research circles for a series starting in 2002 about research linking childhood vaccinations to the rise in autism. The stories have been denounced in some circles as "fear-mongering." Attkisson is, typically, unbowed: "I stand behind it," she says. "It's some of the best work I've ever done. My only regret is that we haven't done more."

Some of "the best work" she's ever done involved falling for one of the most dangerous pieces of Luddite nonsense ever to hit the airwaves, and she also got so taken by the whole Fast And Furious nonsense that she got an award from Reed Irvine's House Of Unemployables.

She also drew attention last year when a conservative group, Accuracy in Media, sought to give her a reporting award at the annual convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference. Despite criticism that the award made her work appear partisan, Attkisson said CBS News decided to accept it on her behalf; it sent its top Washington manager, Christopher Isham, to the presentation when she was called away on assignment. Attkisson said she donated the prize money to a fund created in memory of a slain Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry.

And, CBS, there is one thing we know — the only reason you sent Isham to pick up that award is because you were too scared not to do so. The main problem with the coverage of the Whitewater story was the problem of corruption by access. There were parallel stories going on — the first being the endless ratfking of the Clinton presidency, and the other being the official investigations prompted by said ratfking. If you wanted to cover the latter, and practically everyone did, you had to ignore the former story, or else your access to the leaks from various congresscritters and government lawyers would be cut off. So the story of a campaign to delegitimize a twice-elected president got buried by the delegitmization itself. (There were notable exceptions, of course, my pal Gene Lyons first among them.) I think Sharyl Attkisson has the same problem here. I think, to use a later example, that she's already drifted across the desert sands into Judy Miller Land.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/whitewater-benghazi-hearings-050813