a "myopic zeal" - CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe
 

(Hoosier sarcasticly adds: I wonder if the 'media' will bury this story. As of 2:00 (four hours after its release), it doesn't appear on Google News. It was the lead story on Limbaugh, of course, and will be on Hannity, but Al Franken didn't mention it at noon.)

CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer

NEW YORK - Four CBS News staffers were fired Monday following the release of an independent investigation that said a "myopic zeal" led to the airing of a discredited story about President Bush (news - web sites)'s military service.


The panel's 224-page report detailed dozens of missteps, including the reliance on documents that were allegedly forged to a circle-the-wagons mentality that compounded the damage.


CBS fired Mary Mapes, producer of the report aired Sept. 8 on "60 Minutes Wednesday"; Josh Howard, executive producer of the show; his top deputy Mary Murphy; and senior vice president Betsy West.


Dan Rather, who narrated the report, was faulted for "errors of credulity and overenthusiasm," but was not disciplined by top CBS executive Leslie Moonves. Rather announced in November that he was stepping down as anchorman of the "CBS Evening News," but insisted the timing had nothing to do with the investigation.


CBS News President Andrew Heyward kept his job. The panel said Heyward had explicitly urged caution before the report aired.


Moonves had appointed former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, retired president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press, to investigate what went wrong. They delivered their report last week.


"These problems were caused primarily by a myopic zeal to be the first news organization to broadcast what was believed to be a new story about President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, and the rigid and blind defense of the segment after it aired despite numerous indications of its shortcomings," the panelists concluded.


Boccardi and Thornburgh said they could find no evidence to conclude the report — aired two months before Bush won re-election — was politically motivated.


The report cited documents purported to be from one of Bush's commanders in the Texas Air National Guard. The documents say the commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, ordered Bush to take a medical exam and the future president did not. Killian also reportedly felt pressured to sugarcoat an evaluation of then 1st Lt. Bush.


Questions were quickly raised about the memo. Some document experts said the memo appeared to have been written on a computer that had not been invented at the time.


Although the panel said it couldn't prove conclusively the documents were forged, it said CBS News failed to authenticate them and falsely claimed an expert had done so when all he had done was authenticate one signature.


The panel said Mapes had misled her superiors about the documents and the background of her source, retired Texas National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.


CBS News executives relied too heavily on Mapes, who only months earlier had broken the story about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and had been investigating Bush's National Guard service since 1999. Howard, who had begun supervising "60 Minutes Wednesday" in June, gave too much deference to her and Rather, the panel said.


Reached at her Dallas home Monday, Mapes said: "I haven't seen the report yet, so I won't be saying anything until I do."


Two days after the report, Heyward ordered West to review the opinions of document examiners and confidential sources who had supported the story — but no such investigation was done, Thornburgh and Boccardi said.


"Had this directive been followed promptly, the panel does not believe that `60 Minutes Wednesday' would have publicly defended the segment for another 10 days," Boccardi and Thornburgh wrote.


The panel faulted Rather, and said it did not appear he had even seen the report until its broadcast. And it said CBS' apology, issued nearly two weeks after the report aired, unfairly pinned too much blame on Burkett and not enough on its own failures.

_


Following the independent investigation, CBS News appointed one of its executives, Linda Mason, to a newly created job of senior vice president of standards and special projects. It will be her job to thoroughly review everything about an investigative scandal before it airs.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of "60 Minutes" on Sunday, will oversee the Wednesday broadcast as well for the rest of the TV season.

Both Moonves and the panel said it hoped the report did not have a "chilling effect" on CBS News' commitment to investigative journalism.

"By doing what needed to be done, as painful as some of these steps are, we hope to have moved decisively to set the record straight, and to turn this crisis into an opportunity to make CBS News stronger than it ever has been," Moonves said.

Re: a "myopic zeal" - CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe
 

Well, if Google News has become the benchmark on how a story should be reported or played, I'm sure you'll be happy to know that it is the "lead" on AOL.

Geez.

It was given "Headline" status on CBSNews.com and NBCNews.com. It was a more minor headline on ABCNews.com and CNN.com.

I will also guess that the story will be carried on all of the major network newscasts this evening, along with a lot of local newscasts.

I also think it will get a fair amount of play in the newspapers.

So, what's your point?

Would you have it lead the news and be played above Iraq, the Palestinian Elections and the Tsunami stories?

Give it a rest. The story isn't going to be ignored.

By the way, the panel came to the same conclusion that I and probably anyone else familiar with the way network news departments operate -- the main problem here was with the producer, Mary Mapes. That's just the way the networks operate.

Re: a "myopic zeal" - CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe
 

Consider the following stories which are bigger and I'll say more important (not in any order):

(1)Tsunami in South and South East Asia which caused over 140,000 death.
(2) The election of the new Palestinian President
(3) The murder of the Iraqi Chief of Police in Baghdad. Or was it the deputy chief of police?
(4)Nuclear submarine running aground

Re: Re: a "myopic zeal" - CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe
 

It has a prominent position on the New York Times.

I think some news articles take a while to appear in some networks.

-Rudey

Re: Re: Re: a "myopic zeal" - CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe
 

Absolutely.

6:12 PM, MST. The network newscasts just ended in this time zone.

CBS used the story as its lead. With everything else going on in the world, I question that, but understand that they were between the proverbial rock, etc. A bad day at Black Rock -- what the CBS HQ is called by insiders. No way for them to win on this, they would catch flack no matter what they did and how they positioned the story.

NBC led its second segment and probably did more that I would have with the story. Much more and it would have seemed like the network was gloating. Not that I would consider that they might have something to gain being the one with the new anchor.

I was switching around, so I don't know if ABC ran the story or not.

Back to the original post, thinking that the media would bury this story shows a basic misunderstanding of the American Journalistic process.

No way was that going to happen.

Google let me down
 

Google let me down. I've always been suspicious of them.

Re: Google let me down
 

Google is a search engine that posts some news stories -- not a journalistic organization.

With all due respect, even behind the shield of sarcasm, your initial post shows the same "rush to judgement" mentality toward the media that the panel charged CBS with.

It's always easy to charge the media with being biased, one sided and unfair, but we all keep watching and reading.

Consider the amount of news reported daily with the number of stories proven to be wrong or biased, and I think the media record will look pretty good.