It looks like CBS won’t be airing that hatchet job on Reagan after all. I haven’t said much about this, but this is one aspect of the story that I’ve found galling from the beginning:

CBS lawyers had reviewed the miniseries and given it the go-ahead, but Moonves ordered lawyers to give it another look and for CBS to cut out certain portions.

This is most disingenuous. I assume that we are supposed to come away from this statement with the idea that it was fact checked. But in real fact, lawyers have nothing to do with facts–the only reason for a lawyer to look at it would be to determine if airing it would put CBS in legal jeopardy, not to determine whether it was factual or not.

Since Ronald and Nancy Reagan are public figures, there’s almost nothing that CBS could have aired that would have gotten them into hot water, from a libel standpoint. Having lawyers “give it a look,” is meaningless, because said lawyers would do so, and then simply inform the network execs what I just did–that they could air it without fear of a lawsuit, and facts be damned.

Had Moonves been honest, rather than a duplicitous worm, and wanted to reassure people that it was truly fair, he’d not have talked about lawyers. He’d have said, “we’ve had the script reviewed by historians and people who knew the Reagans closely, and they’ve assured us that it is historically accurate.”

But of course he couldn’t say that, because it would have been an outright lie, easily disprovable by talking to people like Lou Cannon. So instead he prevaricated, and hoped that no one noticed. Fortunately, he hoped wrong.