Two days ago, CBS altered an interview with John McCain where he made another major policy gaffe, this time in the timeline of the Iraq war. They didn’t just edit McCain’s response to the question, they completely changed his response (using the answer from a different question).

As MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported, “CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric’s question, but in response, it inserted part of McCain’s answer to another question instead.”

What CBS did was to change McCain’s response from one which showed his lack of understanding of his signature subject of Foreign Policy and turned it into an attack on Obama saying Barack Obama “cares more about winning the election than winning a war.” Watch the side-by-side below

Now, CBS has done it again. This time, they scrubbed McCain saying “The fact is we had four years of failed policy. We were losing. We were losing the war in Iraq. The consequences of failure and defeat of the United States of America in the first major conflict since 9/11 would have had devastating impacts throughout the region and the world.”

Apparently, the Senator forgot about Afghanistan.

In case you need a refresher, here is the timeline:

September 11, 2001, attack on the twin towers and Pentagon

October 7, 2001, US begins war with Afghanistan

March 19, 2003, US begins war with Iraq

May 1, 2003, Bush announces Mission Accomplished

If you want an extended timeline, from 2003 to present, click here.

Should you be as outraged as I am, feel free to express yourself to the CBS ombudsman at publiceye@cbs.com (more contact information below).

Oregon Activist over at TPMM had a good comment about media activism. I am reposting it here:

Media Activism 101 1: Know your key message and be able to include it in every response and every opportunity. Sure, you might get lampooned by Jon Stewart, but even in the lampoon your message is repeated 20 times. 2: Speak in terms of values and beliefs, not with facts and figures. If people are not moved by your values argument, they will not believe your facts and figures anyway. 3: Project a unified worldview. Believe it or not, the Right has condensed every issue to three main ideas: a) the rugged individual, bootstraps, go it alone American; b) government interferes with people, not a solution, gets in the way, limited role; c) the market is the solution for all problems. Doesn’t matter whether it’s education, health care or the environment, they can trot those three ideas out and they do, constantly reinforcing a unified worldview. We don’t do that! We could project a unified worldview that a) we are all in this together, that we are a community with a shared responsibility to help each other thrive; b) government is best suited to address social problems when people have the power to hold it accountable; and….the problem is that we have not defined a good counter-worldview that we all agree on. 4: Write letters, call in complaints. One time years ago I called the editor of the Oregonian and after he said “Why should I care what your think?” and I countered because you don’t want to look unethical, he looked into my complaint and even wrote an perfect editorial addressing my complaint. Track objective info about your local media and then meet with them to discuss your concerns – with stats on #’s of stories, etc. 5: Read Talking the Walk by Makani Themba-Nixon 6. Go to Grassroots Policy Project and download and read everything. Toss Don’t Think of an Elephant in the trash.

If you want to read more about how we might take the media back, read this, this and this. Be sure to read all the comments, too. Many are quite good. Raider99 and Ripper McCord, at TPMM, started the ball. It’s time for us to pick it up and run with it.

Here is a list of contact information for many media outlets across the country.

Psssst…do something! To start, distribute this post far and wide.

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Cross posted at Think Left. Live Right.