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Why is CBS News interviewing a military "expert" who is a confessed liar--a man who falsly claimed to be a combat veteran--and treating him like a credible guest? Is it becuase they're simply not a real news organization anymore? Or because they never were one?
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Why?
Because CBS news was radio and is now TV and radio - and on TV and in radio you have to essentially make up stories with a phony beginning, middle and end. Television and radio are useful for two things - showing us pictures of what is happening, and alerting us to pending or actual emergencies...as for reporting the news, in the sense of giving us the whole story, they aren't capable of doing so because to tell, say, the whole story of what happened today in Fallujah would take a couple hours of broadcast time.
People complain about pols working with sound-bite politics...but the sound bite is, of course, a TV/radio thing; TV and radio are the most baleful thing to happen to the transmission of information since communication began - and TV is worse because it shows pictures, which are always lies in that they only catch a snapshot of time and can never provide context.
Why do I say this? Because I was a professional with first-hand knowledge regarding several things they did stories on. The stories weren't just "in error". They were, to use Matt's phrase, just batshit. No relationship to any reality on Planet Earth. At. All. And yet they got awards every year, and 98.9% of American's thought highly of them. I shrugged my shoulders and moved on.
As just one example, consider the huge 1986 story about so-called "unintended acceleration" of Audi automobiles. It was a load of crap from first to last and anyone with an ounce of knowledge about automobiles *knew that*. There is not a car made that has an engine more powerful than its brakes. But somehow these Mad Audis were rocketing out of control, even though the owners swore up and down they were standing on the brakes as hard as they can. Yeah, right. Can you say "operator error"? Well, maybe you can, but there's no ratings in that, so CBS news couldn't say it. When, after months of arguing, with Car &Driver magazine (among others) in the role of SBVFT (but without the speed advantage of the Internet), it was shown conclusively that things *could not* have happened the way CBS reported them, CBS... issued an apology and retraction? Nah. Well, they did do a partial retraction, but never cited the test results. And they *certainly* didn't do a story about the fact that Audi sales were decimated in the US for 15 years, and many, many people lost their jobs due to that.
Other Urban Myths perpetrated by 60 Minutes and other incompetent members of the news services? That the Corvair had anything in particular wrong with it. Wrong. That the Pinto was more prone to gas tank failures than competitive models. Wrong. That the GM X-cars were more prone to spin out than their competitors. Wrong. And yet IME about 95% or folks, even educated conservatives, believe these things. It's just not possible for each of us to fact-check all the knowledge we receive, from science or the "news". That's why it's such a big freakin' deal when they lie.
So, these recent things from CBS? The only thing different is that there were external fact-checkers this time. Their modus operandi, and status as a "news organization" haven't changed in decades.