Oh my! This is priceless. Let me take a quick stab at fisking...
CBS Ousts 4 For Bush Guard Story
NEW YORK, Jan. 10, 2005
Dick Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi (Photo: CBS/AP)
Complete Independent Panel report on CBS News
Exhibits and Appendices for report
Official CBS News reaction and actions taken
(CBS) Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been ousted for their role in preparing and reporting a disputed story about President Bush’s National Guard service.
The employees were actually fired, after a much delayed investigation into a phony story they colluded to make up became well known as a complete fraud.
The action was prompted by the report of an independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.
Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated.
The correspondent on the story, CBS News anchor Dan Rather, is stepping down as anchor of CBS Evening News.
Dan Rather, one of the head architects of the fraud, was forced to retire for his role in the scam.
“We deeply regret the disservice this flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday report did to the American public, which has a right to count on CBS News for fairness and accuracy,” said CBS President Leslie Moonves.
We deeply regret being caught in our lie, and even more deeply regret John Kerry was defeated, since his victory would have placed us in a much better corporate position after the fraud was discovered by bloggers.
The panel said a "myopic zeal" to be the first news organization to broadcast a groundbreaking story about Mr. Bush’s National Guard service was a key factor in explaining why CBS News had produced a story that was neither fair nor accurate and did not meet the organization’s internal standards.
The myopic zeal was obviously motivated by blind partisan politics, since any undergraduate journalist student would never have broadcast a story after such a pathetic vetting process.
The report said at least four factors that some observers described as a journalistic “Perfect Storm” had contributed to the decision to broadcast a piece that was seriously flawed.
"The combination of a new 60 Minutes Wednesday management team, great deference given to a highly respected producer and the network’s news anchor, competitive pressures, and a zealous belief in the truth of the segment seem to have led many to disregard some fundamental journalistic principles," the report said.
The piece was aired during a tight and hotly contested presidential race between Mr. Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry. The timing of the story prompted charges of political bias against CBS News.
The fraudulant story was obviously timed in order to bring down a sitting President and help elect the liberal John Kerry.
While the panel found that some actions taken by CBS News encouraged such suspicions, “the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content.”
Since the panel is part of the "inside the beltway" media crowd, they lacked the courage to conclude what any American with half-a-wit of intelligence knows, namely, the entire motivation of the fraudulant story was designed to help elect John Kerry. The panel also failed to note in its analysis, that a string of reports extremely critical of President Bush preceeded the 60 minutes story, further clarifying to the American public 60 minutes political agenda. Coincidentally, the same 60 minutes which did a fluff piece just a few months leading up to the Iraq war on the murdering tyrant Saddam Hussein.
The story, which aired last Sept. 8, relied on four documents allegedly written by one of Mr. Bush's Texas Air National Guard commanders in the early 1970s, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who is now dead. Questions about the authenticity of the documents were raised almost immediately.
The story relied exclusively on documents so easily distiguishable as phonies it took "pajama-wearing" bloggers less than 12 hours to completely refute their authenticity.
Some critics said the documents were most probably forgeries prepared on a modern word processer. Other critics questioned whether Killian would have - or could have - written them.
Expert after expert reviewed the documents and concluded they were phonies, yet 60 minutes clung to their fraudulant story for weeks after airing. In fact, to this day 60 minutes refuses to acknowledge what is obvious to all, the documents are fake, and have always been fakes.
The documents suggested that Mr. Bush disobeyed an order to appear for a physical exam, and that friends of the Bush family tried to “sugar coat” his Guard service.
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.
After Dan Rather pleaded for days to believe me, just because I am Dan Rather, the public inundated CBS news with emails and telephone calls forcing CBS to call for an investigation in the hopes of quelling the firestorm.
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.”
CBS news producer Mary Mapes was caught in a routine practice of collaberation with Democrat party campaign advisers, her carefully orchestrated strategy to help elect John Kerry, was instrumental in producing a television commercial within days of the 60 minutes report.
The panel noted that the Guard segment was rushed on the air only three 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 Howard and senior broadcast producer Murphy.
The guard segmant was rushed on the air in the hopes of rescuing John Kerry's poll numbers which were in a free-for-all after the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth exposed his as a phony war hero.
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 during the period in question. 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.
The panel believes a turning point came on Sept. 10, when CBS News President Andrew Heyward ordered West to review the opinions of document examiners who had seen the disputed documents and the confidential sources supporting the story.
But no such investigation was undertaken at that time.
“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,” the report said.
The panel made a number of recommendations for changes, including:
Appoint a senior Standards and Practices Executive, reporting directly to the President of CBS News, who would review all investigative reporting, use of confidential sources and authentication of documents. Personnel should feel comfortable going to this person confidentially and without fear of reprisal, with questions or concerns about particular reports.
Foster an atmosphere in which competitive pressure is not allowed to prompt airing of reports before all investigation and vetting is done.
Allow senior management to know the names of confidential sources as well as all relevant background about the person needed to make news judgments.
Appoint a separate team, led by someone not involved in the original reporting, to look into any news report that is challenged.
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