CBS Sunday Morning Mocks Bush's Bestselling Book

My wife and I are big fans of the CBS Sunday Morning show. Lots of interesting stories and they don't usually contain much of a political slant. However, they were caught in either a pretty bad screw-up or a blatant insult to George W. Bush:

Like so many CBS "Sunday Morning" pieces over the past 30 years, the one on book covers this past weekend seemed gentle, fair and snark-free.

Unless you took a really close look. When a series of book covers flashed by on-screen, former President George W. Bush's recent memoir was no longer titled "Decision Points," but instead carried this title and subtitle: "Desision Points: How I Managed to Go Eight Years without Making One Good Decision."

The cover, of course, was a fake - a computer-altered version that had appeared earlier on The Drudge Report, though its exact origin couldn't be learned Tuesday.

CBS News Tuesday blamed the gaffe on a production mistake made under deadline pressures. A spokesman noted that in researching book covers for the story, this particular cover was unintentionally pulled down from the Web and then clipped into Erin Moriarty's report - at a particularly inopportune moment, in fact, when she was saying "a good cover tells you what kind of book it is without giving too much away."

In a statement, CBS said, "It's a mistake no one could see because you'd have to freeze the frame to notice it," adding that this was "another cautionary tale about the risks of the Internet age. Clearly, we have to be more careful when downloading material."

CBS News has occasionally had a fraught relationship with Bush, leading some to charge the network with bias. A "60 Minutes II" story in 2004 on Bush's Air National Guard service was based on memos that were subsequently determined to have been faked. The incident ultimately led to Dan Rather's departure from the network.

The show has always seemed to have a lot of integrity. I would tend to believe this was a mistake, maybe compounded by a staffer whose bias kept them from noticing the error.