Slashdot Mirror
CBS Cleans House In Wake of Erroneous Story
An independent review panel gave CBS News a scathing rebuke for its story last fall about President Bush's national guard service. The report noted that in a story that was neither fair nor accurate, and did a "disservice" to the American public, the CBS News staff had a "myopic zeal" to get the story first and gave a "rigid and blind defense" after it aired. The story's producer, Mary Mapes, was fired. Three other executives were asked to resign. The network, noting that he was scheduled for retirement from CBS Evening News in a couple of months, recommended no action be taken against Dan Rather.
The story is accurate. There was plenty of other evidence besides phony memos. Which makes me suspect Karl Rove as the source of the forged memos, since the forgeries effectively cut off legitimate discussion of this issue. Now conservatives can just laugh off the charges and blame them on the phony memos rather than actually respond to them.
I agree - this is the most interesting aspect of this story; that nobody seems to want to investigate who forged the documents. I have my suspicions and they're on the right, not the left, of the political spectrum. I have no evidence for that other than Rove's history of dirty tricks and the fact that this incident ONLY benefited the Bush conservatives. But that's circumstantial at best -- it could very well have been a liberal DUMBASS who thought it would be a good idea to forge documents. But I suspect Rove because it seems completely designed to end discussion of a potentitally damaging story -- this functionally ended the debate over Bush's military service. There is plenty of other evidence that the Bush family pulled strings and the most reasonable speculation is that Bush jumped ship in order to avoid being drug tested. But after the CBS screwup, no big media would touch the story with a ten foot pole (other than to discuss the CBS forged memos).