Allahpundit has tonight's roundup of RAthERGATE. You need to follow the links for the full flavor. Can anyone tell me what "OWN3D!" stands for?
September 20, 2004
"He did not come to us; we went to him and asked him for the documents."
Who told them Burkett had the documents?
UPDATE: I Tivo'd it and watched it again. Surreal. Highlights follow, but the fact that CBS approached Burkett, and not vice versa, is the bombshell.
As everyone and his mother now knows, Burkett served in the Army National Guard. So how does Rather introduce him? As an officer in the Air National Guard. He's engaging in shitty reporting while he's apologizing for shitty reporting.
Right before they cut to the interview clip, Rather said Burkett "is well known in National Guard circles . . . for trying, for several years now, to discredit President Bush's military service record." I'll let Sandler respond to that point on behalf of CBS's viewers.
Unfortunately, Rather didn't shed any light on the point I raised in the preceding post about whether Burkett had supplied them with a new name. All he said was that Burkett has now "changed his story, and told us he got the documents from a different source, one we cannot verify."
The interview itself was, as Bill says, comic gold, with each party trying to blame the fuck-up on the other. Burkett admitted that he had misled CBS about the source but only because "your staff pressured me to a point to reveal that source. . . . And I simply threw out a name that was basically, it was uh, to get a little pressure off for a moment." He said he didn't forge the documents and continues to believe that they're real, and then he dropped this: "[B]efore I gave up any documents, I wanted to know what you were going to do with them, and I insisted that they be authenticated." Which, as it turns out, they weren't. OWN3D!
It ended with Rather saying CBS News "deeply regrets" using the documents and that "I want to say personally and directly, I'm sorry." But he insisted the error had been made "in good faith" in the course of asking "tough questions". Yeah. Tough questions like, "Is it possible that a Bush-hating kook might feed us preposterously forged bullshit?" In any case, if there was any admission in there that the documents were forgeries or that the rest of the story had been fatally compromised, I must have missed it.
RatherBiased has the full transcript. Also, Baseball Crank adds a few Josh Marshall posts to the timeline of events. And reader "cirby" makes a very good point: Why was Burkett treated as an anonymous source? He's been famous for years for his Bush-bashing, so much so that the Boston Globe devoted an entire article to him in February. Why would he be so worried about his public profile now? Could be the election, of course, or, as cirby suggests, it could be that keeping Burkett's identity secret had less to do with protecting him than with protecting CBS's own credibility. After all, it's a lot easier to hang a story on a guy who thinks Bush = Hitler when the public isn't aware of that fact. Food for thought.
Posted by Allah at September 20, 2004 06:46 PM | TrackBack
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