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.

Comments

Note that CBS does not say the story was wrong.

[Futurepower(R)]

Be careful about the Slashdot story. It does not say what you might imagine it says. Below are quotes from a video of a CBS newscast, CBS Panel's Conclusions:

"The story wasn't ready." "The panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries." "We didn't find any actual [political] bias." "Mary Mapes said she still believes the documents were well corroborated."

NOTE: CBS has recently begun offering videos of its most important newscasts online, mostly without commercials. The videos display only in Internet Explorer, not the latest versions of Mozilla or Firefox. CBS uses Javascript in poor ways, there are problems with its video servers, and some videos have been edited incorrectly for transmission. I get different results at different times. I complained to CBS about this about two weeks ago in connection with another story, and did not receive a reply. They seem to be working on the problems, since delivery has changed and improved in the last two weeks. Ignore messages that say, "Could not connect to remote server." I could not play the videos with the latest version of Opera, which is quite compatible with IE-specific coding, but that may have been because of my specific installation.

Note that the quotes from the CBS newscast don't say that CBS has decided the story was false. CBS only fully accepts its responsibility for sloppiness in the preparation of the story.

Also, the CBS focus was misleading. The real story was that George W. Bush disappeared from Air National Guard records in exactly the same month that the ANG instituted drug testing.

Lt. Bush's reported behavior was consistent with the known behavior of alcoholics, and Bush has admitted to being an alcoholic. Alcoholics often use other drugs to heighten the desired effects of alcohol and to try to diminish the undesired effects.

I served in the U.S. Air Force in the years around the time that Lt. Bush served, and I was stationed at a base that had the aircraft he flew. The CBS documents were consistent with the operation of the Air Force at that time, which was remarkably tolerant of alcoholism. The entire U.S. culture at the time was tolerant of alcoholism, but the USAF as I experienced it was even more so.

I have specific, detailed knowledge that the Air Force was far more corrupt than has been reported in stories I've seen. For example, F-106 aircraft, the successors to the F-102 aircraft that Lt. Bush flew, had severe defects in their inertial guidance systems that meant that F-106s were often not available to perform their mission. This was not a conscious conspiracy; they could not get the systems to work properly, and apparently all USAF departments tended to cover up failures rather than report them sufficiently. Remember that this was a time when people had far less technical knowledge than people generally have today.

At the time, no one would have found it remarkable that a pilot was an alcoholic, or that someone received special treatment because of political pressure. That was just the way things worked. This is so important that maybe I should repeat it: That's just the way things worked back then. Back then few adults had parents who had attended college. The accepted educational level was far less in a way that cannot be measured by the number of college years someone had.

I know about the failure in F-106s because I fixed the problem. I found that some of the amplifiers used in the inertial guidance system had parasitic oscillations because of solder joints of amazingly poor quality. At the time, I was familiar with all base operations that involved electronics repair, and I very much doubt there was anyone else on base who had enough technical knowledge to know what parasitic oscillations were. Mostly they just kept replacing things until they found that the symptom of the problem had gone away. We Slashdot readers take technical knowledge for granted, but widespread te

The expert said they were produced on a computer

[GQuon]

"The panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries."

But their document expert concluded, categorically, that the documents were produced on a computer after the 1970s. That's pretty close to saying "forgery". The only reservations against declaring them a forgery, that I can think of, is that they were copies, that time travel could be at play here, or the remote possibility that they were indeed TANG documents about ANOTHER Lt. Bush from the 1990s misdated to the 1970s.

"We didn't find any actual [political] bias."

To do that Mapes & Co would have to admit it, or submit to polygraphs or whatever. But Mapes' emails show how she was trying to get the documents from Bill Burkett by connecting him with the DNC, and by getting him a book deal. Something about affecting the momentum of the campaign.

But is bias onlyt a clearly stated policy of working for one of the candidates, which she came pretty close to doing, or is bias also letting yourself be affected by wishing that the story is true?

Something rather unimportant to our world today turned into quite farce. But aren't anybody going to look at WHO actually made the documents? It's illegal to forge military documents, and some states have laws against trying to influence elections with false documents.

There has been a lot said...

[Jhon]

... but little attention has been paid to the communications between CBS news and the Kerry campaign.

Let me back up a bit.

When the entire 'memogate' deal started, I held out. I kept saying, "I trust Rather. I trust CBS". Sure Rather is biased. It's fairly obvious to anyone to takes a look. But he has a great history behind him. That history was hard to ignore. It took me a few days to see the memos for what they really were. And when I did, I was upset. And when Rather continued to defend them, in spite of CBS's own document experts coming forward saying they NEVER validated the documents, I got pissed.

When it came out that there was at least SOME communication between CBS and the Kerry campaign and the story aired the same flippin' time the "Fortunate Son" BS started from the Kerry camp, I became livid.

Mapes claimed at the time that the only communication she had with the Kerry camp was when she put Burkett in touch with them. That, it turns out, was a lie. It appears Chad Clanton tells a story a bit different than Mapes.

As the report states, there is no evidence that the CBS piece was politically biased. Yet there is certainly quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that the driving force of this piece, Mapes, WAS politically motivated. No. Obsessed would be a better word. The apparent collusion between CBS news and the Kerry campaign was not addressed to my satisfaction. Her outright lies that the documents had a clear chain of custody, came from an 'unimpeachable' source and continued insistence of their accuracy -- it's just appalling. Add to this the links to the Kerry campaign and coincedental "Fortunate Son" ads, any reasonable person should suspect Mapes of being out to "get" Bush.

And that is what I suspect. I believe Rather stuck with story so long out of trust of Mapes. And I believe Mapes had an agenda that those around her refused to see. I'm glad Mapes was fired. I don't think she'll ever have a name in her field again. I have little doubt she'll write a book, make a bundle and retire. But she will no longer be working.

Dan Rather moving to other things.

[AtariAmarok]

In the wake of these troubles, Dan Rather plans to turn to other matters after he retires in March. According to unnamed sources, Rather claims to have located Jack Ruby's Blackberry. He is going to use the information in it to reveal amazing breaththroughs in the JFK assassination.