Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 8)

UPDATE: The New York Times is reporting that CBS is going to back off of the documents authenticity, possibly as early as today. And as long as I'm updating, here's some X-files/Ra^thergate fanfic from Jim Treacher.

UDPATE 2: CBS has abandoned the documents and confirmed Bill Burkett as the source, saying he misled them about his source for the documents. From Dan Rather's statement:

Now, after extensive additional interviews, 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.

Michael Dobbs has an excellent roundup in The Washington Post of the latest evidence pointing to Bill Burkett as CBS's source for the forged documents.

Newsweek reports that CBS's source received the documents anonymously in his mailbox. To recap: the documents are photocopies supposedly from a dead man's personal files, sent anonymously to a Bush-hating crank and faxed to CBS. That's a hell of a chain of custody.

Kerry's campaign may have gotten the same forged documents from Burkett.

The Daily Recycler has the video of the ABC report on CBS's own document examiners.

Radio host on CBS affiliate fired for criticizing Dan Rather. The cynic in me suspects he'll be the only person fired over Ra^thergate.

Washington Posts's side-by-side comparison of authentic documents from Lt. Col. Killian with CBS News forgeries. They don't look anything alike.

One of the CBS memos says that Colonel Staudt had put pressure on Killian to "sugercoat" Bush's record. This despite the fact that Staudt had retired the previous year.

Staudt came forward last week, denying he was under any pressure, or that he put pressure on anyone else. Now CBS has dismissed Staudt's statement. Powerline says it best:

Staudt's testimony would seem to definitively put the lie to CBS's faked memos, but that's not how CBS sees it. Yesterday CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius brushed off Staudt's comments:

In a debate this heated, one can hardly expect Gen. Staudt to endorse the point of view that he exerted undue influence.

So if you slander a man, as CBS did General Staudt, the fact that he has been slandered makes his response so suspect that it can safely be disregarded. And information from a person in a unique position to know the facts, like General Staudt, is immaterial; but Bill Burkett, a long-time Bush hater and Democratic activist who knows nothing about Bush's Guard service, is an "unimpeachable source," while a comment by Robert Strong to the effect that the forged documents sound like something that could have been written in the early 1970's satisfactorily confirms the documents' authenticity, even though, by his own account, Strong has never met President Bush, never spoke to Jerry Killian about President Bush, and has no idea whether the documents are forgeries or not.

At CBS News, the fact that a witness knows what he is talking about is deemed sufficient to disqualify him: an odd way to do journalism.

This LA Times piece compares the CBS News scandal to past journalistic scandals. It also has an insightful take on the documents.

The weight of expert technical opinion is that the documents are forgeries, probably the product of a contemporary word-processing program rather than the IBM Selectric typewriters in use at the time. But there is no need to descend into an arcane discussion of how many kerns can dance on the head of a microchip to sort this out. CBS has admitted that it never has possessed or seen the originals. In other words, the credibility of its report turns on photocopies provided by an anonymous source.

No reputable document examiner will authenticate anything from a photocopy � they simply are too easily manipulated. This is not complicated. Rather and Mapes, therefore, are in the position of having broadcast a report based on documents whose authenticity they cannot establish. It doesn't matter whether the contents are genuine or not, because nobody � not even "60 Minutes" � can prove it from photocopies. You do not report what you cannot prove. This, too, is not complicated.

From the doggie, Frank Abagnale, the forgery artist who was the inspiration for the movie Catch Me If You Can, told Neil Cavuto "If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been Catch Me In Two Days."