A Black Eye for CBS News
LA Times
September 15, 2004
<font size=4>CBS News has been had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion about newly discovered documents that CBS and anchor Dan Rather are defending as revealing the truth about George W. Bush's military service.
Despite Rather's statement Monday that the network <font color=blue>"believes the documents are authentic,"<font color=black> the evidence keeps mounting that they are not. As The Times reported, conservative bloggers detected glaring inconsistencies, such as a Microsoft Word type style. So many other discrepancies have since emerged that it would require a willful suspension of disbelief to take them as merely coincidental.
For example, the alleged memos from Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who was Bush's squadron commander, contain stylistic problems, such as the fact that Killian signs his rank not in accordance with National Guard procedure.
In addition, Killian's signature on a memo dated May 4, 1972, is different from one on file in the Pentagon. The part of a memo supposedly written by Killian that refers to pressure from an earlier Bush commander to help out the young fighter pilot is highly dubious. The 1973 memo is dated almost a year and a half after the commander had resigned from active duty. The best CBS can do is to declare that he remained a powerful behind-the-scenes figure. Well, maybe. But how does CBS know that? CBS could tell us more about where these documents came from without having to reveal the names of its sources.
As CBS flounders, conservatives are citing this episode as an egregious case of liberal media bias, while some liberals are indulging in the comforting notion that Karl Rove, who is responsible for everything bad that happens everywhere, must be behind the documents.
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Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't really need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that . Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country. It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School.
CBS may have managed to place Bush's Vietnam-era service off-limits as a campaign issue, after weeks when John F. Kerry's impressive record has been under savage attack. Bush gave a smirky speech Monday to the National Guard Assn., waxing on about the patriotic sacrifices of the Guard's men and women over the years.
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