Memo to CNN President Jon Klein ~ By Joseph Farah

By Joseph Farah Posted: August 08, 2009 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 It has been more than a week now since you wrote a memo to your entire editorial team explaining that the Obama birth certificate story was "dead" because Hawaii had destroyed all original, long-form, hospital-generated documents. In fact, it has been a week since the state of Hawaii repudiated your baseless assertion. Isn't it time to apologize for your error and to Lou Dobbs for attempting to intimidate him for covering the story? And since your basis for not covering the story has been blown to smithereens, isn't it time for you to issue a new edict to your news team to get back on the story? What am I missing? Perhaps you were just looking for an excuse not to cover the story in the first place? Your network is going to be left in the dust on one of the biggest stories in the history of the country. But I don't suppose that matters to you. My guess is that you are one of those media executives who puts politics ahead of news. That's what I surmise of your network's coverage of this story as well as many others. Your original position, which I can only assume you have modified after being proven wrong, was laughable even if your facts were correct. I don't know if you're old enough to remember Watergate. I was trying to imagine Ben Bradlee or Katherine Graham calling off the Washington Post's Watergate investigation because an 18-and-a-half-minute gap had been discovered in a critical White House recording. It's a good thing we had more determined media executives – and reporters – in the 1970s than we have today. While most of the big corporate media coverage of this story has been AWOL, CNN's is in a class by itself. It speaks for itself as well. As an example, I would cite this report CNN prepared on Lou Dobbs' program when he was absent.

Is this what you would call an "objective" report? Is this what you would call "balanced"? Is this what you would call "fair"? It's a 6-minute-45-second report. More than half was a one-sided set-up. Then two people who actually know something about the controversy are given less than two minutes to explain to the nation why the president of the United States has never proven his constitutional eligibility for office. Then two people who know nothing about the issue go on a name-calling binge – including maligning my own news agency, the only one that has actually investigated the story. [CONTINUE READING]