Amanda Carpenter

Former GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson is pushing back hard against a CBS reporter’s editorial assessment of his remarks at a rally for John McCain and Sarah Palin earlier today.

“Seems as if, all of a sudden, some of my old buddies over at CBS have become very sensitive to what they consider to be hyperbole on the presidential campaign trail. Imagine that,” Thompson told Townhall. Listen to Senator Thompson's full statement here.

CBS Reporter John Bentley, who covered Thompson’s presidential campaign as an embed reporter, wrote a very negative analysis of the speech Thompson gave to introduce GOP vice presidential candidate Palin. “Some of Thompson’s statements about the politician he was introducing seemed to the stretch the limits of credulity,” Bentley “reported.”

Bentley quoted Thompson as saying, “Sarah Palin is the most remarkable success story in the history of American politics.” Bentley then surmised, “which would seem to put her ahead of George Washington (winning the Revolutionary War, becoming the country’s first president), Abraham Lincoln (overcoming poverty, ending slavery, holding the union together), and Franklin Roosevelt (overcoming polio, defeating the Nazis, being elected president four times).”

“I didn’t realize that the mainstream media considered winning the Revolutionary War and freeing the slaves to be political events,” Thompson told Townhall. “But, nevertheless, it just occurs to me that this woman went from the PTA to becoming the vice presidential nominee, and along the way became Governor; took on and defeated the entrenched powers, the big oil companies, her own state party chairman, [and] an incumbent Republican governor while reforming the energy policies for Alaska to the benefit of the entire country. If she’d been a liberal woman doing all this, CBS and the other networks would already be fighting over the rights to create a television series about her.”

The same day Bentley snarked about Thompson’s appearance, the CBS Network removed a web ad created by the McCain campaign from the Internet. The ad contained a clip of CBS Anchor Katie Couric deriding the prevalence of sexism in American politics, which CBS said was unacceptable to use.

"CBS News does not endorse any candidate in the presidential race,” the network said in a statement. “Any use of CBS personnel in political advertising that suggests the contrary is misleading.”

Amanda Carpenter
