To: Katie Couric, Anchor, CBS Evening News with Katie CouricSean McManus, President, CBS News,
Rome Hartman, Executive Producer, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric
Sandy Genelius, CBS News Spokesperson
Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent
Brian Montopoli, Editor, CBS News Public Eye
Just thought I would let you know that in Lara's ('Battle for Haifa Street') the footage of dead Iraqi soldiers killed by, as Lara puts it, "Sunni gunmen" and "obtained by CBS," is actually identical to footage posted to an Al-Qaeda website a week before Lara's report was posted to the CBS website.
How exactly did CBS obtain the footage? Were CBS and Lara aware that it bore the official stamp of Al Qaida, having been released by the Islamic State of Iraq's media arm, the Al-Furqan Institute for Media Productions, under the title ‘Some of the Casualties of the Heretics in Haifa Street After Sunday’s Fighting, January 7, 2007, in Baghdad?’
In her mass email of last week Lara wrote that her report should be seen by the American public because the plight of civilians on Haifa street, caught in a war zone and under constant threat of death, was "too important to ignore." I agree. But isn't the fact that CBS missed framing the fighting in its proper context by using the generic "Sunni gunmen" in the place of Al Qaeda jihadists too important to ignore? Isn't CBS's posting of a report by its chief foreign correspondent to its website featuring a clip from an Al-Qaeda propaganda video also too important to ignore?
Links to the the al-Qaeda footage can be found at New York Sun columnist Nibras Kazimi's non-Sun affiliated blog Talisman Gate in the comments section of his post entitled 'Interesting Controversy Surrounding CBS’s Lara Logan.'
http://talismangate.blogspot.com/2007/01/interesting-controversy-surrounding.html
Sincerely, Robert Stevens, East Village, NYC January, 29, 2007
