January 10, 2005

RatherGate Report Nails CBS; Four Executives Gone

The memogate fiasco at CBS involving those forged documents with with CBS' Dan Rather slandered President Bush, has finally resulted in CBS firing some people. I won't be dissecting the report here - you need to stick with Powerline, RatherGate.com, Little Green Footballs, RatherBiased.com and Instapundit for the heavy lifting. But it's worth noting that the just-released investigative report commissioned by CBS on the journalistic scandal is at odds with the recent piece written by Corey Pein in the Columbia Journalism Review (which Powerline helpfully shredded here).

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt calls the report a whitewash. Also, over at TKS, Jim Geraghty is dissecting the report. And Instapundit is providing copious links to reactions and analysis of the CBS scandal investigation report. That report will be picked clean and its bones bleached white by the sun by evening rush hour.

Okay. Who will take the RatherGate report and create a blogged version of it - fill it with hyperlinks to blog posts, news articles, websites and documents that support its stated facts - or contradict them?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Via SlantPoint: "The law firm where Dick Thornburgh works has a web page on the report, complete with exhibits of the transcripts from CBS broadcasts relevant to the case. Also included are documents from Bill Burkett and tons of supporting documents. Bloggers: don't just read the report. Go back to the original memos and do your own Thornburghing."

The complete CBS report is 224 pages long and you can read it here in a PDF file. Here's an excerpt from CBS's story today reporting on the results of the investigation into how CBS committed a slanderous journalistic fraud...

After a stubborn 12-day defense of the story, CBS News conceded that it could not confirm the authenticity of the documents and asked former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press President Louis Boccardi to conduct an independent investigation into the matter.

Their findings were contained in a 224-page report made public on Monday. While the panel said it was not prepared to brand the Killian documents as an outright forgery, it raised serious questions about their authenticity and the way CBS News handled them.

The panel identified 10 serious defects in the preparation and reporting of the story that included failure to obtain clear authentication of the documents or to investigate controversial background of the source of the purported documents, retired Texas National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.

The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was also faulted for calling Joe Lockhart, a senior official in the John Kerry campaign, prior to the airing of the piece, and offering to put Burkett in touch with him. The panel called Mapes' action a "clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias."

The panel noted that the Guard segment was rushed on the air only six days after 60 Minutes Wednesday had obtained some of the documents from Burkett and that preparation of the piece was supervised by a new management team of executive producer Josh Howard and senior broadcast producer Mary Murphy.

A key factor in the decision to broadcast the piece was a telephone conversation between Mapes and Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, Killian's commanding officer. Mapes told the panel Hodges confirmed the content of the four documents after she read them to him over the phone.

Hodges, however, denied doing so. He also told the panel he had given Mapes information that should have raised warning flags about the documents, including his belief that Killian had never ordered anyone, including Mr. Bush, to take a physical.

Hodges said that when he finally saw the documents after the Sept. 8 broadcast, he concluded they were bogus and told Rather and Mapes of his opinion on Sept. 10.

"This alleged confirmation by Major General Hodges started to march 60 Minutes Wednesday into dangerous and ultimately unsustainable territory: the notion that since the content of the documents was felt to be true, demonstrating the authenticity of the documents became less important."

Mapes' telephone conversation with Hodges was part of a vetting process that the panel concluded was wholly inadequate, largely because it had to be done so quickly. The key executives vetting the piece were West, Howard, and Murphy.

After rushing the piece to air, the panel said, CBS News compounded the error by blindly defending the story. In doing so, the news organization missed opportunities to set the record straight.

"The panel finds that once serious questions were raised, the defense of the segment became more rigid and emphatic, and that virtually no attempt was made to determine whether the questions raised had merit," the report concluded.

UPDATE: I just scanned the text of the report for the word "blog" and found something interesting. Producer Mapes spent a lot of time digging around on left-wing blogs for anti-Bush material. No wonder she came up with fraudulent documents and produced a story of nothing but lies. When you lie down with dogs...