Confirming the important role that NewsBusters played in exposing Hillary Clinton’s bogus “sniper fire” story, CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson told the Los Angeles Times’s “Web Scout” blog that it was in fact our March 18 NewsBusters item that prompted her to debunk Clinton’s claims in a March 24 report for the CBS Evening News.

According to the April 8 posting by David Sarno, the Times’ Internet culture and online entertainment writer:

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson didn’t realize she had a story on her hands until a colleague e-mailed her a link to 12-year-old footage of the Bosnia trip that she herself had reported on, which had been posted on newsbusters.com [actually, NewsBusters.org] several days earlier. “I clicked on a link and was stunned to see it was the same trip,” Attkisson said in an interview.

Can you imagine any major television news network doing a report on a Republican Congressman's history of exorbitant earmarks without mentioning his Party affiliation?

The words "Republican," "GOP," "right-wing," or "conservative" would likely appear in almost every sentence, correct?

Well, as amazing as it might seem, the "CBS Evening News" on Friday did a fabulous segment about Congressman Jack Murtha (D-Penn.) and his free-spending ways when it comes to his own district, but never once informed viewers that he was a Democrat (video embedded upper right, h/t Hot Air via NBer Blazer):

Of the three morning shows, only ABC's “Good Morning America” highlighted the implications of a new report on pork barrel spending by the group Citizens Against Government Waste [CAGW]. GMA was the sole network morning program to mention that Democrats broke their campaign promise to cut such pork projects in half. On Wednesday, NBC's “Today” show skipped the subject completely and although CBS's “Early Show” covered the report, correspondent Sharyl Attkisson ignored the $296 and $97 million, respectively, in pork spending that Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are responsible for.

GMA reporter Jake Tapper, while discussing the just released Pig Book, a CAGW compendium of wasteful government spending, announced, “Congress stuffed into the fiscal year 2008 spending bills 11,610 pork barrel projects, the second highest total ever.” Tapper alone highlighted this salient point about the differences between Clinton, Obama and Republican Senator John McCain: “Senator Hillary Clinton is the biggest porker of the three. 281 earmarks worth $296 million. Senator Obama is next. 53 earmarks worth $97 million. Senator John McCain has never requested an earmark.”

One week after Hillary Clinton claimed that she faced sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia — and six days after NewsBusters posted contemporaneous news footage from CBS showing that she did not — the big broadcast networks have finally jumped on the story of Hillary’s big fib. Last night, as NewsBuster’s Noel Sheppard has already noted, the CBS Evening News featured a Clinton-busting report by Sharyl Attkisson, one of the journalists who accompanied Clinton on her trip 12 years ago and who narrated the video we posted last week.

Also last night, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who was also on the 1996 trip, filed her own report on the obvious discrepancies, and this morning all three morning shows led with how the Clinton campaign now admits her claim, “I remember landing under sniper fire...There was no greeting ceremony and we basically were told to run to her cars. Now, that is what happened,” was an accidental misstatement.

In the "Better Late Than Never" category, CBS News has finally reported a misstatement by Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton my colleague Rich Noyes exposed last Tuesday.

For those with short memories:

In a speech on Iraq policy delivered Monday at George Washington University, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recalled facing “sniper fire” on her 1996 trip to Bosnia to visit U.S. troops on a peacekeeping mission. But reporters traveling with the then-First Lady made no reference to any “sniper fire” at the time, and pictures of Clinton arriving at the main air base in Tuzla (see attached video) don’t show anyone ducking or covering.

The video contradicting Clinton's recent account of this trip referenced by Noyes was a report by Sharyl Attkisson for the March 25, 1996, CBS "This Morning." Almost exactly twelve years later, and six days after NewsBusters first exposed this gaffe, Attkinson logged the following report on Monday's CBS "Evening News":

It’s better late than never, might be what vaccine manufacturers are thinking right now.

The pharmaceutical industry had maintained all along that there’s no proven link between a vaccine preservative called thimerosal and autism. CBS had been unwilling to concede that notion until last night.

“In health news tonight, new research finds no link between mercury in vaccines and autism in children,” Katie Couric said on the January 7 “Evening News.” “Suspicion had focused on a vaccine preservative called thimerosal, which contains mercury. Thimerosal was eliminated from most vaccines in 2001, but since then a study in California showed that, instead of going down, autism cases there continued to climb.”

In contrast to the morning shows which exploited the arrest of Republican Senator Larry Craig, on charges stemming from alleged lewd conduct in an airport men's room, as a chance to tar the “right wing,” “conservatives” and the “GOP,” with the notable exception of CBS, the broadcast network evening shows -- which all led Tuesday night with Craig -- refrained from using the matter to malign Republicans or conservatives. ABC and NBC kept the story to Craig himself as ABC's World News framed the story around the on-screen heading: “Defiant Senator.” The NBC Nightly News keyed its coverage to how “Senator Craig Speaks.”

In contrast, the CBS Evening News saw a “scandal,” with “Craig Scandal” as the on-screen title. Katie Couric teased: “Tonight, Senator Larry Craig caught in a sex sting says the only thing he did wrong was plead guilty.” She led by declaring “the story exploded on front pages all over America today: Another member of Congress caught up in a scandal, a sex scandal. Republican Senator Larry Craig caught in a police sting at the Minneapolis airport.” In the subsequent story, reporter Sharyl Attkisson highlighted how “the GOP is already under a cloud with FBI investigations of Congressmen Rick Renzi, John Doolittle, Don Young, and Senator Ted Stevens.” Stuart Rothenberg, of the Rothenberg Political Report, then helpfully explained: “The Republican brand at the moment is very weak. And what this does, this adds to the buzz about Republicans and what do Republicans believe, and are Republicans hypocrites.”

A night after CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, without any consideration for cutting other spending, presumed taxes must be hiked to pay for infrastructure repair, CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson ludicrously described federal and state governments as “cash-starved” as she relayed the expert view of just one person, a Democratic Congressman, whom she said blames the lack of courage to “collect” more taxes. A nice euphemism for raising taxes. On Thursday night, Couric had asked: “Are taxpayers ready to spend the billions, maybe trillions, it would take to fix all the pipelines, tunnels and bridges?” (My NB item)

On Friday night, Attkisson noted that out “of the $2.7 trillion federal budget, it's estimated only around $50 billion a year goes for infrastructure” while “experts say what's needed is $210 billion a year for five years.” After citing a couple of examples of misguided pork barrel spending for road projects when repair work goes wanting, Attkisson pointed out how “Congress only funds about 25 percent of the nation's infrastructure.” She then absurdly asserted that states and local governments which “pick up the rest of the tab” are “cash-starved too.” For her only expert assessment, Attkisson turned to Democratic Congressman Jim Oberstar, Chairman of the very committee which funnels the pork spending, described as “Congress's leading authority on infrastructure” who “says both Congress and the White House have traditionally had trouble making the tough decision to collect and spend more tax dollars on infrastructure.”