What about Dan?
Will the other shoe drop at CBS?•
GLENN REYNOLDS
Back before the election, CBS broke a story -- which it, at least, thought, and hoped, would be fatal to President Bush's reelection prospects -- about George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was based on documents, purportedly produced by a typewriter in 1971, that looked suspiciously identical to documents produced on a computer with Microsoft Word. (How suspicious? Go here and see the animated .gif overlaying one with the other).
CBS stonewalled for a long time, but eventually apologized, and promised an investigation, one that was to report after the elections.
Well, it's after the elections. And we're still waiting:
"We're all apprehensive," Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer says over chicken soup and pizza at an Old City eatery. (He was in town Tuesday to flog his new book.) "Nobody knows what this commission is going to find. Look, we made a terrible mistake. CBS has admitted it made a terrible mistake, and Dan has apologized. We take this very seriously, and some serious steps are going to have to be taken."
Will Rather -- or Sixty Minutes producer Mary Mapes -- be fired? Some people are speculating that Schieffer may be named as Rather's replacement.
Regardless, I think that it's important for CBS to take this as seriously as Schieffer promises. Because, as Mike Goodwin writes, this election was devastating for media credibility:
Even before we knew who won the election, we knew who lost it: the media. And the race wasn't close.
News organizations of every stripe and type took a beating in the campaign of 2004. Mostly, they earned it, with the result being the clock has been turned back on decades of progress in standards and fairness. Trust in the media is at an all-time low.
Screw-ups were a big part of the story, the lowlight being CBS News' September "scoop" on favored treatment given to George W. Bush 30 years ago in the National Guard. Shockingly, CBS still has not come clean about the blunders of Rathergate. It outsourced its ethics probe and has yet to hold anyone accountable.
But bat-blind mistakes like that are only the most obvious signs of a deeper problem. The heart of the matter is trust - and how it is being squandered.
There's nothing wrong with attitude and advocacy from pundits, though both of those have started to bleed over into what was supposed to be straight journalism. But journalists are supposed to report facts truthfully. (Heck, even pundits are supposed to do that.) The line between the two has blurred, and standards for truthfulness have slipped, and it has been very damaging. How CBS deals with this scandal will help to determine just how deep the damage goes. |
