I say they fire Dan Rather first.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/po...rint&position=
September 20, 2004
CBS Admits It Was Misled by Ex-Officer on Bush Documents
By JIM RUTENBERG
and MARK J. PRENDERGAST
CBS News acknowledged today that a former National Guard officer from Texas had "deliberately misled" it in its inquiry into President Bush's National Guard service by providing it with "a false account" of the origins of documents used to reinforce questions raised about Mr. Bush's service three decades ago.
"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," the president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, said in a statement issued by the network. "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."
"Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable, and independent reporting," Mr. Heyward continued. "We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust."
The network said the former Army National Guard officer, Bill Burkett, had "acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents" and that he "admits he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
"Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman," the CBS statement said. "Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point."
A new interview with Mr. Burkett will be shown tonight on the "CBS Evening News," the network said.
CBS also announced that it was "commissioning an independent review of the process by which the report was prepared and broadcast," adding that "their findings will be made public."
In a separate statement today, Dan Rather, the CBS anchor who presented the original report on "60 Minutes" on Sept. 8, said that "we made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry,"
The statements ended days of expressions of confidence in the documents' authenticity by the network and Mr. Rather.
Signs of serious misgivings within CBS appeared on Sunday, when network officials, who asked not to be identified, said the network had been deceived about the documents' origins and had begun intensive reporting on where they came from. Executives also said that they were coming to the conclusion that the report was too flawed to have gone on the air.
Officials met Sunday night with Mr. Rather to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision.
His original report had relied in large part on four memorandums seeming to be from the personal file of Mr. Bush's Air National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos, dated from the early 1970's, said that Colonel Killian was under pressure to "sugar coat" the record of the young Lieutenant Bush and that the officer had disobeyed a direct order to take a physical.
Mr. Rather and others at the network were said to still believe on Sunday night that the sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings.
The developments on Sunday and today marked a dramatic turn for CBS News, which for a week stood steadfastly by its Sept. 8 report as various document experts asserted that the typeface of the memos could have been produced only by a modern-day word processor, not Vietnam War-era typewriters.
The seemingly unflappable confidence of Mr. Rather and top news division officials in the documents allayed fears within the network and created doubt among some in the news media at large that those specialists were correct. CBS News officials had said they had reason to be certain that the documents indeed had come from the personal file of Colonel Killian.
Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said last week, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents."
But CBS executives decided on Sunday that they would most likely have to declare that they had been misled about the records' origin after Mr. Rather and a top network executive, Betsy West, met in Texas with Mr. Burkett, who had helped the news division obtain the memos.
Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and CBS said today that his answers to Mr. Rather's questions had led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that the memos had come from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material.
In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Burkett declined to answer any questions about the documents posed by The New York Times.
On Sunday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail.
In an interview on Sunday night she declined to name the producer who told her this, but said the producer was in a position to know. CBS News officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the night before the initial `60 Minutes" report that it would face questions from documents experts.
In the coming days, CBS News officials plan to focus on how the network moved ahead with the report when there were warning signs that the memorandums were not genuine.
Ms. Will is one of two documents experts consulted by the network who said they raised doubts about the material before the segment was broadcast. Another expert, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he had vouched only for Colonel Killian's signatures on the records and not the authenticity of the records themselves. Mr. Matley said he could not rule out that the signatures had been cut and pasted from official records pertaining to Colonel Killian.
In examining where the network had gone wrong, officials at CBS News turning their attention to Ms. Mapes, one of their most respected producers, who was riding particularly high this year after breaking news about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for the network.
In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes" Wednesday edition, said that he did not initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but that he did not see any reason to doubt it. He said he believed Ms. Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt upon the essential thrust of the report.
"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day," he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility."
He added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis."
Ms. Mapes has not responded to requests for comment.
Mr. Howard also said in the interview that the White House did not dispute the veracity of the documents when it was presented to them on the morning of the report. That reaction, he said, was "the icing on the cake" of the other reporting the network was conducting on the documents. White House officials have said they saw no reason to challenge documents being presented by a credible news organization.
Several people familiar with the situation said they were girding for a particularly tough week for Mr. Rather and the news division should the network announce its new doubts.
One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, "Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?"
-Rudey
Linear Mode
