joegreen writes
CBS ~ apologys
NEW YORK - CBS on Monday said it cannot vouch for the authenticity of documents used to support a "60 Minutes" story about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service after several experts denounced them as fakes.
The network said that while it was "deliberately misled," it was wrong to go on the air with a story that it could not substantiate.
"Based on what we know now, CBS News can't prove the documents are authentic," CBS President Andrew Heyward said in a statement. "We shouldn't have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret. Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable and independent reporting. We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust."
'Full confidence' initially
The statement began with this explanation of events:
"'60 Minutes Wednesday' had full confidence in the original report or it would not have aired. However, in the wake of serious and disturbing questions that came up after the broadcast, CBS News has done extensive additional reporting in an effort to confirm the documents' authenticity. That included an interview featured on last week's edition of '60 Minutes Wednesday' with Marian Carr Knox, secretary to the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, the officer named as the author of the documents; the interview with Bill Burkett to be seen tonight; and a further review of the forensic evidence on both sides of the debate."
CBS said Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, had provided the documents. In a press release accompanying Heyward's statement, CBS said that Burkett "also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
The documents were said to be written by Killian, indicating he was being pressured to ''sugarcoat'' the performance ratings of a young Bush, then the son of a Texas congressman, and that Bush failed to follow orders to take a physical. Killian died in 1984.
Rather issues own statement
CBS also said it was commissioning an independent review of the incident, and will announce the names of the people conducting the review shortly.
The announcement was a major blow to the credibility of CBS News and its chief anchor, Dan Rather, who reported the story.
In his own statement Monday, Rather said:
"I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where — if I knew then what I know now — I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.
"But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism."
Almost immediately after the Sept. 8 story aired, document experts questioned memos purportedly written by Bush's late squadron leader, saying they appeared to have been created on a computer and not a typewriter that was in use during the 1970s.
CBS strongly defended its story, and it wasn't until a week later — after the military leader's former secretary said she believed the memos were fake — did the news division admit they were questionable.
Even then, Rather said no one had disputed the story's premise: that the future president had pulled strings to get a relatively cushy National Guard assignment and failed to satisfy the requirements of his service.
White House raises Kerry question
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush was told about the CBS statement.
''There are a number of serious questions that remain unanswered and they need to be answered," McClellan said, "Bill Burkett, who CBS now says is their source, in fact is not an unimpeachable source as was previously claimed. Bill Burkett is a source who has been discredited and so this raises a lot of questions. There were media reports about Mr. Burkett having senior level contacts with the Kerry campaign.''
For ''60 Minutes,'' it's the biggest ethical mess since the 1995 incident captured in the movie, ''The Insider,'' which depicted the newsmagazine caving to pressure from CBS lawyers and not airing a whistleblowing report from an ex-tobacco executive.
The call for an independent review was also reminiscent of CNN's ''Tailwind'' scandal in 1998. The cable network retracted a story that the U.S. military had used nerve gas in Laos during the Vietnam war.
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