CBS firings should go higher up, critics say
By Peter Johnson and Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — It was quiet along 60 Minutes row Monday as usually outspoken veterans such as correspondent Mike Wallace and others kept mum on a day when four CBS News colleagues lost their jobs.
"The people on the front lines got fired while the people most instrumental in getting the broadcast on escaped," 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney said.
"It's a sad day" is all Wallace would say of the fallout from the 60 Minutes "Memogate" story that questioned President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.
So it was left to Andy Rooney, the 85-year-old 60 Minutes commentator, to weigh in.
"The people on the front lines got fired while the people most instrumental in getting the broadcast on escaped," Rooney said He was referring to the firing of producer Mary Mapes and the requested resignations of a senior vice president and two 60 Minutes producers while anchor Dan Rather and CBS News chief Andrew Heyward kept their jobs.
Rooney's opinion was echoed by some outside observers who said CBS didn't go far enough.
"Neither Heyward nor Rather are paying" for their parts in the story, said Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, which has long accused Rather and CBS News of tilting left politically.
Although Rather announced in November that he'll step down in March as anchor of The CBS Evening News, "he's being moved over to the very show (60 Minutes) that he embarrassed," Graham said.
Rather took Monday off.
But CBS chief Leslie Moonves said that the "appropriate action has been taken." The facts unearthed by an independent panel revealed that Heyward ordered his staff to "vet this story very carefully and not rush it on the air. If he is guilty of anything, it was relying on his people."
Rather, exhausted after a whirlwind of reporting on a hurricane in Florida and the Republican National Convention, deferred to Mapes, his producer, "who said she has an unimpeachable source," Moonves said. "Dan believed her."
Moonves adopted the panel's recommendation Monday that CBS News overhaul its story oversight and appointed a CBS executive to lead the process.
The panel was directed to focus solely on the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes on which the original report aired. As such, it didn't address what CBS News — as an institution — needs to do to ensure that nothing like the documents fiasco happens again, said Tom Rosenstiel of Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
"The question the public wants answered is, 'What did you learn from this, and what did you do to assure me that we can trust your reporting?' " Rosenstiel said. "You cannot realistically isolate 60 Minutes Wednesday from the rest of CBS News."
As such, Rosenstiel predicts that "people inside CBS News, press critics, commentators and citizens will chew over this report — and people within CBS, in particular, will say 'this isn't enough.' "
Kent Collins, a professor of broadcast news at the Missouri School of Journalism, said CBS did "exactly what journalism organizations should do. They brought in two heavyweights and gave them lots of time" to issue a report that was "good medicine for journalism — painful, but good."
Evening News reported Monday that Mapes said CBS News executives knew her every move — a view Moonves rejected. "I was surprised how a very strong producer could get so far down the field without anybody tackling her," he said.
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