CBS leads the way again:

But what is really troubling about this story, aside from the chutzpah of someone like Freeh accusing anyone else of going easy on the Saudis, is the agenda shown by CBS News in going after Clinton on this story, given that they were ready to air this story tonight without a rebuttal and without talking to anyone who was at the meeting in question. You see, CBS News was ready to air this story tonight on Freeh’s claims, when it turns out that Freeh himself wasn’t even at the meeting wherein he claims that Clinton asked the Saudis for a contribution and went easy on them regarding the Khobar Towers bombing. And worse yet, Mike Wallace was told that there were at least five people who attended the meeting who could dispute Freeh’s allegations, and he was also told that Freeh wasn’t even at the meeting himself. Yet Wallace, “60 Minutes”, and CBS News were ready to put the smear on Clinton tonight anyway.

This is the kind of media treatment the GOP buys for itself by slapping around CBS News over the TANG disaster. It looks like Andrew Heyward, chief at CBS News, was quite ready to be the White House’s puppet, after getting a hall pass from them in the aftermath of the TANG mess. And had it not been for Kurtz’ piece in Friday’s Post, which was the first time the Clinton camp had even heard that CBS News was ready to run the smear without rebuttal, Heyward was all set to deliver exactly what the White House hoped from its investment.

That is the purpose of harping on the so called Liberal Media Bias. Figures on the right admit that there is no such thing:

That the media were biased against the Reagan Administration is an article of faith among Republicans. Yet James Baker, perhaps the most media-savvy of them, owned up to the fact that any such complaint was decidedly misplaced. “There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don’t think we had anything to complain about,” he explained to one writer. Patrick Buchanan, among the most conservative pundits and presidential candidates in Republican history, found that he could not identify any allegedly liberal bias against him during his presidential candidacies. “I’ve gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage–all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the ‘liberal media,’ but every Republican on earth does that,” the aspiring American ayatollah cheerfully confessed during the 1996 campaign. And even William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America today, has come clean on this issue. “I admit it,” he told a reporter. “The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”

but they stay after it in order to get stories like the one CBS was planning to do: slanted to the point of dishonesty in the right wing’s favor. Remember that when someone starts talking about a liberal media. They aren’t interested in a media that tells the truth — they are interested in a media that tells them what they want to hear.