CBS to say it was misled on Bush Guard memos

[LRB]

CBS to say it was misled on Bush Guard memos

Network plans to issue statement on disputed documents used on '60 Minutes' broadcastBy Howard Kurtz

Updated: 7:16 a.m. ET Sept. 20, 2004CBS News plans to issue a statement, perhaps as early as today, saying that it was misled on the purported National Guard memos the network used to charge that President Bush received favored treatment 30 years ago.

The statement would represent a huge embarrassment for the network, which insisted for days that the documents reported by Dan Rather on "60 Minutes" are authentic. But the statement could help defuse a crisis that has torn at the network's credibility.

It is not clear whether the statement will include an apology for a story now believed to be based on forged documents, although that is under consideration, sources familiar with the matter said. The sources said they could not be identified because CBS is making no official statement.


CBS has stood by the story, even as numerous document experts have called the memos forgeries and a former secretary in Bush's Guard unit told reporters, including Rather, that the memos were fake -- although she said they reflected the feelings of Bush's former squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard.

The statement was being hammered out last night after Rather went to Texas to tape an interview with Bill Burkett, the retired Guard official widely believed to have helped provide "60 Minutes" with the memos. Burkett, who has urged Democratic activists to wage "war" against Republican "dirty tricks," would not comment in an e-mail to The Washington Post on whether he had been CBS's confidential source.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward, while declining to comment on what interviews the network may be conducting, said yesterday: "We've said we are trying very hard to get to the bottom of these questions."

Burkett, who retired from the Austin headquarters of the Guard in 1998, has said he once saw some of Bush's military records in a trash can. He also says he overheard a conversation among Guard officials about sanitizing the president's military records, which Guard officials strongly deny.

Burkett's motivation could be suspect because he said in a Web posting last month that he tried to contact John F. Kerry's presidential campaign with information for a "counteratack."

Over the weekend, Bush told the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader that "there are a lot of questions" about the CBS documents "and they need to be answered."

Asked about Bush's remarks, Heyward said: "I don't feel any more pressure than before. I agree with President Bush that the sooner we can resolve these questions, the better."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[Drbio]

CBS is releasing a teaser to get people to watch this episode of 60 minutes and will proceed to make some trivial bullsh#t mention of being misled before showing the Burkett interview which will be clearly anti-Bush.


book it.

[Drbio]

The statement was being hammered out last night <u> after </u> Rather went to Texas to tape an interview with Bill Burkett, the retired Guard official widely believed to have helped provide "60 Minutes" with the memos.

I wonder if C-BS is paying Burkett to be a fall guy or trying to convince him to take one for the team.

[LRB]

CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say

September 20, 2004
THE NEWS MEDIA
CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say
By JIM RUTENBERG

After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from, and people at the network said it was now possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air.

But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night.

The report relied in large part on four memorandums purported to be from the personal file of Mr. Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos, dated from the early 1970's, said that Colonel Killian was under pressure to "sugar coat'' the record of the young Lieutenant Bush and that the officer had disobeyed a direct order to take a physical.

Mr. Rather and others at the network are said to still believe that the sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings but that the documents' authenticity was now in grave doubt.

The developments last night marked a dramatic turn for CBS News, which for a week stood steadfastly by its Sept. 8 report as various document experts asserted that the typeface of the memos could have been produced only by a modern-day word processor, not Vietnam War-era typewriters.

The seemingly unflappable confidence of Mr. Rather and top news division officials in the documents allayed fears within the network and created doubt among some in the news media at large that those specialists were correct. CBS News officials had said they had reason to be certain that the documents indeed had come from the personal file of Colonel Killian.

Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said last week, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents.''

But officials decided yesterday that they would most likely have to declare that they had been misled about the records' origin after Mr. Rather and a top network executive, Betsy West, met in Texas with a man who was said to have helped the news division obtain the memos, a former Guard officer named Bill Burkett.

Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and several people close to the reporting process said his answers to Mr. Rather's questions led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that the memos had come from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material.

It was unclear last night if Mr. Burkett had told Mr. Rather that he had been misled about the documents' provenance or that he had been the one who did the misleading.

In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Burkett declined to answer any questions about the documents.

Yesterday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail.

In an interview last night she declined to name the producer who told her this but said the producer was in a position to know. CBS News officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the night before the initial "60 Minutes'' report that it would face questions from documents experts.

In the coming days CBS News officials plan to focus on how the network moved ahead with the report when there were warning signs that the memorandums were not genuine.

Ms. Will is one of two documents experts consulted by the network who said they raised doubts about the material before the segment was broadcast. Another expert, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he had vouched only for Colonel Killian's signatures on the records and not the authenticity of the records themselves. Mr. Matley said he could not rule out that the signatures had been cut and pasted from official records pertaining to Colonel Killian.

In examining where the network had gone wrong, officials at CBS News turning their attention to Ms. Mapes, one of their most respected producers, who was riding particularly high this year after breaking news about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for the network.

In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes'' Wednesday edition, said that he did not initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but that he did not see any reason to doubt them. He said he believed Ms. Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt upon the essential thrust of the report.

"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day,'' he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility.''

He added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis.''

Ms. Mapes has not responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Howard also said in the interview that the White House did not dispute the veracity of the documents when it was presented to them on the morning of the report. That reaction, he said, was "the icing on the cake'' of the other reporting the network was conducting on the documents. White House officials have said they saw no reason to challenge documents being presented by a credible news organization.

Several people familiar with the situation said they were girding for a particularly tough week for Mr. Rather and the news division should the network announce its new doubts.

One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, "Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?''

[kg_veteran]

Originally posted by: Drbio

I wonder if C-BS is paying Burkett to be a fall guy or trying to convince him to take one for the team.

Was talking to Dooby about this. I clearly think Burkett is the fall guy so that Rather doesn't have to get the axe.

[Drbio]

He added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis.''

Translation: We are covering our management asses for the inevitable fall of the news section, including the liar Dan Rather.






Who didn't see this coming?

[madape]

Somebody at CBS will take the fall. Maples will certainly be gone. Rather is likely fired, too. There are too many people at CBS who want to save their own reputations. This scandal needs to be purged from the network to appease guys like Safer, Bradley, Wallace, Stahl. If Rather and Maples stay, it will signal the end of CBS news.

[Dooby]

The apology:

EXCLUSIVE

STATEMENT FROM DAN RATHER:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question—and their source—vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

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.

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.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

[Drbio]

If that is the complete statement, I am surprised. Obviously if that is the entirety of the message, Rather recieve a HUGE arse chewing. He didn't get to sugar coat like he wanted to do.


I still think he is full of BS and the only reason it has come to this is because he got called out...not because he is truly sorry.

[LRB]

Danny boy doesn't get it if this statement is accurate. What CBS did wrong was not doing a story with forged documents, it was not doing due diligence vetting on the documents. It was ignoring the experts who had questions on the documents in their zeal to do the story. It was ignoring everyone who disagreed with their story as being a partisan supporter of Bush. It was not even mentioning those who disagreed that the documents were fake when they did their story. What Rather did was stoop to the level of stooge mudthrower for the DNC and John Kerry while abandoning all journalistic ethical principles. I'm sorry but this apology is just not good enough.

[knowitall]

I agree. Everyone who lies should be fired.

[Drbio]

Originally posted by: knowitall
I agree. Everyone who lies should be fired.

More fecal quality trollings from Ms. Howard Dean.



What about Bill Clintoon, the Hildebeast, Teddy Kennedy.....oh what's the use. We all know you are only here to troll.

[knowitall]

Yes. All of them. Including Bush.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: knowitall
I agree. Everyone who lies should be fired.

That's not even close to what I said. Here's plain and simple what I said, if someone does a lame ass job and makes a collosal screwup because of it that costs their company dearly, then they should be fired. That's what Dan Rather did. He failed to follow well established proper procedures and made a huge error because if it. This error cost his employer, CBS, an enormus amount of goodwill and credibility capital. Rather should be fired because of this. The fact that he was less than honest doesn't mitigate this one whit.

[LRB]

Raw Data: Text of CBS Statements

Monday, September 20, 2004

Statement by CBS News President Andrew Heyward (search) and Dan Rather (search) about the authenticity of documents used to support a "60 Minutes" story that questioned President Bush's Vietnam War-era National Guard service:

Heyward:

"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 (search), 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.

Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not 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."


CBS News and CBS management are commissioning an independent review of the process by which the report was prepared and broadcast to help determine what actions need to be taken. The names of the people conducting the review will be announced shortly, and their findings will be made public.

Rather:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard (search), CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question — and their source — vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

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.

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.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

[Drbio]

Originally posted by: knowitall
Yes. All of them. Including Bush.

Troll. Go away Ms. Howard Dean.

[knowitall]

Originally posted by: LRB

That's not even close to what I said. Here's plain and simple what I said, if someone does a lame ass job and makes a collosal screwup because of it that costs their company dearly, then they should be fired. That's what Dan Rather did. He failed to follow well established proper procedures and made a huge error because if it. This error cost his employer, CBS, an enormus amount of goodwill and credibility capital. Rather should be fired because of this. The fact that he was less than honest doesn't mitigate this one whit.

This is right on LRB. What you just said. I agree. Fire Rather

Now, just for fun, take out Rathers name and insert Bush's name. Change company to country. I couldn't have said it better!

[Drbio]

Troll.

Ms. Howard Dean wastes forum resources again.

[dude1394]

Yea right. No malice on the part of cbs, just "misled". What a crock...Only rather's firing will do. This is a photo from a cbs news van in the last week. Note the anti-bush sign.

[MavKikiNYC]

From: The News Hour, 09.20.04--Very harsh assessment of Rather's and CBS's actions and response, and a bleak prediction for their respective futures.

MARGARET WARNER: After being challenged for two weeks, CBS News admitted today it could no longer vouch for the authenticity of memos used in a Sept. 8 60 Minutes report questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The network said it was misled on the documents' origin by Bill Burkett, the former Texas National Guard official who gave the disputed memos to CBS.

In a statement, anchorman Dan Rather, who reported the story, said: "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."

CBS' admission and apology

MARGARET WARNER: For more on today's CBS admission, and the wider implications, we're joined by Bob Zelnick, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University. He spent 21 years at ABC news as an executive and correspondent; and Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times, who writes the column, "Regarding Media." Welcome to you both.


Tim Rutten, what do you make of today's admission? Is this enough for CBS to have done?

TIM RUTTEN: I think it's a good first step. But there is something in the CBS statement, the official network statement, that raises some additional questions or at least a troubling issue, which is that they say that Mr. Burkett tells them now that he obtained these documents from a person other than the person he originally said gave them to him.

That suggests to me -- unless this first person was somehow a co-conspiracy of Mr. Burkett's -- that CBS and 60 Minutes never approached this person, did not speak with them, never confirmed Mr. Burkett's story as to the origin of these documents. That's an astonishing lapse in investigative journalism.

MARGARET WARNER: Bob Zelnick, would you call that an astonishing lapse?

BOB ZELNICK: I think the entire episode is an astonishing lapse in journalistic judgment.

I think there were things in Mr. Burkett's background that should have alerted CBS to the possibility of fraud. I think that they never authenticated the documents through their own authenticators, when they started to receive caveats from those authenticators, they ignored them. Then they insisted the documents had been authenticated. They attacked critics.

<u>And then they had what can only be described as the chutzpah for Dan Rather to say, well, the documents may not be valid, but no one has denied the thrust of the story.

There was no thrust to the story without the documents. Without the documents, that report would never have made 60 Minutes or the CBS Evening News.</u>

How the mistakes could have happened

MARGARET WARNER: So, Tim Rutten, what you both are saying is that even if they were misled by this source, they seem to be hanging this all on 'we were duped by a source,' but there were all kinds of warning signals that they just did not take into account.

TIM RUTTEN: Absolutely. Starting with the fact that there is no reputable document examiner in America, at least none who is certified to testify in court - and that's the sort of person to whom you would go in a case like this -- there is no such person who will authenticate a document from a photocopy. It's simply too risky.

I've been party myself to investigations involving documents where we were only able to obtain photocopies, and therefore didn't use them because they're impossible to authenticate.

MARGARET WARNER: Bob Zelnick, you've been on the inside of a major network. You've done a lot of serious investigative and other kinds of reporting. How could this have happened?

BOB ZELNICK: I think the problem with CBS in this case was similar to the problem of CNN in the "Operation Tail Wind" story where they accused the U.S. during the Vietnam era of using chemical weapons against American defectors in Laos.

I think the problem was the mind set. They were so sure that there was wrongdoing by George W. Bush during his National Guard days that they tended to suspend their judgment. They suspended their skepticism. They accepted people, they accepted documents that they should normally and would in the course of investigative reporting have rejected. They didn't hear cautionary voices that they otherwise should have heard.

I think CBS has to look not only outside at the sources that it used but inside at the thinking process and editorial oversight that was sadly deficient here.

MARGARET WARNER: Tim Rutten, you've reported on this heavily. Even if they went into the story with that mind set, CBS had to know that when you go out and say, "we have documents," I mean you're not just presenting conflicting interviews and let the viewer make up their mind; you're putting your reputation on the line.

What is your explanation for how this could have happened?

TIM RUTTEN: Oh, I think it's inexplicable. Other than the fact that as your other guest has suggested when you approach a story from the standpoint that, well, we know what happened here and we're looking for confirmation. Or everybody knows. 'Everybody knows' is the most dangerous phrase in journalism. And if you begin from the standpoint that everybody knows or there is smoke here, there must be fire, sure enough you almost always find matches.

MARGARET WARNER: So, Bob Zelnick....

BOB ZELNICK: May I just add.

MARGARET WARNER: Please, go ahead.

Additional steps CBS needs to take

BOB ZELNICK: <u>Let me add that CBS owes an apology at this point in time to George W. Bush. He was the object of their report. To the extent that their report could not be verified or was based on absolute false documents, he was the victim. </u>I don't know what's keeping Dan Rather from making that apology.

MARGARET WARNER: You're saying this is not enough to diffuse this firestorm over CBS.

BOB ZELNICK: It's not only not enough but I think as it stands now, this episode will linger as a black mark against both Dan Rather and CBS. And they both have additional work to do to clear their names and proceed further.

MARGARET WARNER: Tim Rutten, what else do you think CBS has to do?

TIM RUTTEN: Well, I think they have to do... I'm not in the business of instructing other people on who they should or should not apologize to.

But I think that CBS, if it wishes to maintain faith with its viewers, owes them a thorough investigation and then putting the findings of that investigation in their entirety before the viewers.

MARGARET WARNER: Tim Rutten, following up with you, the White House has suggested during the course of this controversy and suggested again today that the Kerry campaign may be directly or indirectly involved.

What is CBS' responsibility now to get to the bottom of this and actually expose those links if there are any?

TIM RUTTEN: I don't know of any credible report that puts the Kerry campaign in this.

But that's why you need a thorough investigation: Because particularly in the hyperventilated atmosphere of a political campaign, every imaginable charge is going to be made now. So the way you forestall ever imaginable charge is to lay on the table every fact that can be ascertained.

MARGARET WARNER: Bob Zelnick, weigh in on this in terms of how aggressively CBS now has to go after the charge that somehow the Kerry campaign perhaps was involved with Burkett.

BOB ZELNICK: In my judgment, if CBS appoints a capable independent investigator that goes after the producers and correspondents involved in this and comes out with a complete story, the Kerry charge or the Bush charge against Kerry will take care of itself.

I know of nothing to implicate the Democrats -- Kerry or anyone else -- in involvement in this. But I think a fair investigation will disclose anything that happened.

What the media can learn from CBS' mistake

MARGARET WARNER: Bob Zelnick, staying with you for a minute, what do you think are the lessons from this for the media at large?

BOB ZELNICK: I think the basic lesson is the same thing as we instruct our journalism students up here at Boston University. When I teach media, law and ethics and get into The New York Times versus Sullivan, the great libel decision of the mid 1960s, I say this case gave you a complete First Amendment to work with in your investigative reporting.

But unless you use it wisely, unless you use it with conscience, it can be a license for some of the worst reporting that's ever been done. And I think that's a clear example of what happened at CBS.

MARGARET WARNER: Tim Rutten, the first people to point out the fallacies or at least the questions about these documents were these web writers, bloggers as they're known. What does this incident tell you or say, do you think, about the balance between the established media and some of this new media?

TIM RUTTEN: It's a very interesting, evolving relationship.

And I think that what seems to be happening is that the bloggers in particular are taking on a very valuable role as factcheckers, as raisers of questions, not as purveyors of reliable information or firsthand reporting, but there are an awful lot of them out there. They've got extraordinarily various personal and professional backgrounds. They're quite interesting as factcheckers.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. And I wanted to say before we close that we did invite CBS to participate but they declined. Tim Rutten and Bob Zelnick, thank you both.

[dude1394]

Dan Rather, his boss and mary mapes should be fired immediately. As far as the rest of the "main stream media". do they have no shame at all. A major news outlet has colluded with the dnc to smear a sitting president during a war. It's absolutely unforgiveable.

No wonder only 50% of the american people think that the NYTimes is a reliable source of news. Only 1 out of 5!!!! think the NYTimes is unbiased.

And what about a major news anchor having forged documents claiming "I still believe my story". Who the HELL is he to "believe" a story anyway. Whatever happened to reporting news. So if he "believed" in the easter bunny, he'd publish that as well.

So DAN!!! Who is the UNIMPEACHEABLE source?

Fire him immediately. That's why fox, nypost, washingtontimes HAVE to corroborate any and every story put out by the nytimes and the alphabets. There is no way I would trust the NYTimes without independent corroboration. The wapo is at least honest, liberal but they don't seem to work for kerry.