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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (25978)	1/12/2005 8:32:03 AM
From: Suma	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

Even a Penn State Professor agrees with you... At CBS, Hubris So I guess that I will also.... By R. THOMAS BERNER Published on 1/12/2005 If ever there was an example of the biblical injunction that “pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” yesterday's dismissal of four CBS News employees — and, in that light, the impending retirement of longtime anchor Dan Rather — is a good example. A Sept. 8 broadcast of “60 Minutes Wednesday” aired documents concerning President Bush and his Texas Air National Guard service. Uproar was immediate — especially since several Web sources soon showed that the documents were not authentic originals. CBS asked an independent panel to investigate how such a gaffe could have happened. The report was released yesterday. The 224-page report provides example after example of hubris overwhelming common sense and of people who should have known better not knowing better. Yet I doubt the recommendations in the report will really solve the problem. Ousted or asked to resign were Betsy West, the senior vice president who supervised CBS News' prime-time programs; Josh Howard, executive producer of “60 Minutes Wednesday,” and Mary Murphy, his deputy; and the show's producer, Mary Mapes. Mapes was fired, and with good reason. In television news, it's not the on-air correspondent who does the reporting, the fact-checking, the verification, the setting up interviews; it's the producer. Myriad ‘missteps' The report by former U.S. attorney general (and former Pennsylvania governor) Dick Thornburgh and retired Associated Press president Louis D. Boccardi details the many “missteps” along the way, but they all come down to hubris on the part of Mapes and Rather (although the report does not directly fault him). One of the more startling comments in the report notes that while Rather did apologize for the report and did stop defending it, “he did not fully agree with this decision and still believes that the content is accurate.” The panel says it is “troubled by these conflicting statements.” The report lays out the numerous times Mapes (described as having “fervent faith” in the story) was advised that maybe the evidence for her information that Bush received preferential treatment getting into the National Guard during the Vietnam War was questionable. She did not adhere to an important rule of journalism, generally attributed to some nameless journalist in Chicago roughly a century ago: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Put another way, trust but verify, and make sure your sources of verification are solid. It was also a mistake to rely on people's memories, as Mapes did in much of her reporting. You need only to get together at a family reunion and talk about an incident in the past to see how inconsistent and faulty memories are. Then there's the cover-up, about which Rather should know — better than others given his experience reporting on Watergate — it is sometimes worse than the crime. Thornburgh and Boccardi write that once its report was questioned, CBS, rather than check it out, circled the wagons in a way that “mishandled and compounded the damage done.” The panel offers 16 recommendations for management. It suggests the creation of a new senior standards and practices position outside the structure of “60 Minutes Wednesday.” It also suggests the protocol (its word) that CBS News personnel be reminded regularly to check archives “to determine whether information about sources or other relevant background information might be available.” I'm sure many people in journalism and journalism education will turn the panel's recommendations into a case study for future journalists. But I am doubtful that, worthy as they are, they will head off similar problems. Among other things, CBS News, according to the panel, already had published internal standards of accuracy and fairness, and, according to the panel, failed to follow them. More rules aren't going to do any good if people aren't going to follow them. The folks at “60 Minutes Wednesday” didn't follow the rules. It's as simple as that. They paid the price, as they should. The writer is a professor emeritus of journalism and American studies at Pennsylvania State University. This piece