Fenton says, he sat down with an Arab journalist who had interviewed bin Laden and described his violent designs on America, but "our navel-gazing executives" left that part of the piece "on the cutting-room floor." He says CBS executives asked that all references to bin Laden be cut because the story had "too many foreign names..."</NITF>
CBS's London bureau, he writes, "doesn't do much reporting any more. What it does is called packaging," assembling video and facts gathered by outside organizations.</NITF> <NITF>Likening the practice to Dan Rather's use of what Fenton calls "phony" memos in the discredited story on President Bush's National Guard service, Fenton says the networks "take it on trust. Don't shoot it, don't report it -- just wrap it up and slap the CBS eye on it..."</NITF>
Fenton still has a copy of his 1978 script that CBS would not air after his reporting in Iran convinced him the shah was in trouble. But his New York producers had read more "upbeat" accounts "and did not believe" him. The shah was toppled less than three months later.</NITF>
<NITF>In a 1988 report on Saddam Hussein's poison gas attacks in northern Iraq, Fenton says CBS asked him to delete the fact that thousands of victims were Kurdish because "no one knows who the Kurds are."
