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Some of you have seen the recent 60 Minutes segment titled “Sovereign Citizens,” in which the CBS news program examined a marginalized faction of disaffected Americans who live by a largely anarchist belief system and which, 60 Minutes says, the FBI considers a domestic terror threat.
To build its case that the so-called sovereign-citizen movement is a menace to America, 60 Minutes pointed its camera at The Sovereign Society website, holding for about six seconds on a single headline: Never Pay U.S. Taxes Again – Legally. As the shot closes in on the headline and Sovereign Society logo, reporter Byron Pitts asserts that the Internet is full of “an endless stream of mind-numbing seminars on how, with just the right paperwork, you too can beat the system.”
Had Mr. Pitts, his researchers or 60 Minutes’ legal team bothered to read beyond the headline the producers chose to emphasize, they would have instantly realized that The Sovereign Society story they played up had nothing to do with the premise of the 60 Minutes segment.
Where 60 Minutes focused on a band of largely poor Americans who effectively believe the U.S. government is illegitimate, our story was about expatriation, which remains a fully legal, non-violent, non-confrontational option for Americans who wish to renounce citizenship for asset-protection reasons – a move that ultimately would result in not owing taxes to the U.S. government, legally.
Originally posted by Caji316
Thats why my t.v. hasn't been on since last year....it's all fantasy and no truths...
An isolated lapse? Consider the Emmy-winning 60 Minutes segment in March 1981 revealing how the most common type of tire rim used on heavy trucks can fly off, killing or maiming tire mechanics and other bystanders. Again CBS relied on film from the Insurance Institute, this time showing an exploding rim shredding two luckless dummies, an adult and a child. Such footage, said Mike Wallace, "shows graphically what can happen when a wheel rim explodes." Insurance Institute spokesman Ben Kelley (who had also appeared on the Jeep segment) explains that a truck tire is under enormous pressure. "And if that metal, for any reason, dislodges, it fires off like a shell out of a cannon."
Again, 60 Minutes did not see fit to tell viewers exactly why the metal happened to dislodge in the film clip. It turned out that, according to the Insurance Institute, the rims had been "modified" to get them to explode for the demonstration.
Well, actually, the rims' locking mechanism had been deliberately shaved off for the test. Under questioning in a later deposition, an Insurance Institute employee acknowledged that the testers had to go back and shave off more and more of the metal in stages before finally getting off enough of it--an estimated 70 percent-that the rims would explode.
Should 60 Minutes have to give back its Emmy? Nah. Maybe they can just take the statuette to a machine shop and have 70 per cent of it filed off. Then they can keep the rest.
N JUNE 1978, at the height of the Ford Pinto outcry, ABC's 20/20 reported "startling new developments": evidence that full-size Fords, not just the subcompact Pinto, could explode when hit from behind. The show's visual highlight was dramatic. Newly aired film from tests done at UCLA in 1967 by researchers under contract with the automaker showed a Ford sedan being rear-ended at 55 mph and bursting into a fireball.
"ABC News has analyzed a great many of Ford's secret rear-end crash tests," confided correspondent Sylvia Chase. And they showed that if you owned a Ford--not just a Pinto, but many other models--what happened to the car in the film could happen to you. The tone was unrelentingly damning, and by the show's end popular anchorman Hugh Downs felt constrained to add his own personal confession. "You know, I've advertised Ford products a few years back, Sylvia, and at the time, of course, I didn't know and I don't think that anybody else did that this kind of ruckus was going to unfold." You got the idea that he would certainly think twice before repeating a mistake like that.
If ABC really analyzed those UCLA test reports, it had every reason to know why the Ford in the crash film burst into flame: there was an incendiary device under it. The UCLA testers explained their methods in a 1968 report published by the Society of Automotive Engineers, fully ten years before the 20/20 episode.
CBS's Mike Wallace got caught again; this time fooling his "60 Minutes" audience with a phony document that made it look like a U.S. Customs official was trying to help Mexican drug smugglers.
On April 20, 1997, Wallace hosted a "60 Minutes" segment that claimed Customs officials were allowing trucks with drugs to cross easily into the United States.
As proof of his allegations Wallace cited what he claimed was a U.S. Customs memo written by Rudy Camacho, then the San Diego Customs district director.
Last week, Michael Horner, a Customs department whistleblower who had anonymously provided Wallace and "60 Minutes" with the memo, admitted he had fabricated the document.
Horner, 47, pleaded guilty to two felony counts last week.
The bogus memo "60 Minutes" said was written by Camacho provided instructions to Customs inspectors at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry to give easy clearance to a trucking company suspected of drug smuggling for a Mexican cartel.
Wallace never bothered to interview Camacho before broadcasting the allegations. Camacho later sued Wallace and won. The case got almost no national publicity. As part of its settlement, "60 Minutes" apologized on-air for making the allegations about Camacho.
Still, Wallace, who made his career demanding others answer his questions, has been ducking questions from the press about the Camacho controversy.
On September 8, 2004, Dan Rather cited “exclusive information, including documents” to justify major CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes stories alleging that George W. Bush shirked his duties when he was in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1960s and 1970s. Within a few hours of those documents being posted on CBS News’ Web site, however, typography experts voiced skepticism that the documents had actually originated with their alleged author and Bush’s former commanding officer, the late Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian.
As the evidence mounted, Rather stubbornly clung to the idea that his story was bulletproof, and he derided critics as partisans and Internet rumormongers. When he “apologized” on September 20, Rather would not concede that the documents were forgeries, only that he and CBS could “no longer vouch for their authenticity.” On November 23, 2004, CBS announced that Rather would soon be leaving his job as anchor of the CBS Evening News. An investigative report released on January 10, 2005 faulted CBS’s rush to put the flawed story on the air and their “stubborn” defense in the days that followed, but oddly decided that they could not blame partisan bias.