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NEW YORK - Four CBS News staffers were fired Monday following the release of an independent investigation that said a "myopic zeal" led to a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story about President Bush's military service that relied on allegedly forged documents.

The network fired Mary Mapes, producer of the report; Josh Howard, executive producer of "60 Minutes Wednesday" and his top deputy Mary Murphy; and senior vice president Betsy West.

Dan Rather, who narrated the report, announced in November that he was stepping down as anchorman of the "CBS Evening News," but insisted the timing had nothing to do with the investigation.

Rather "asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and over-enthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues in regard to this segment," top CBS executive Leslie Moonves said.

Given Rather's apology and announcement that he was stepping down, Moonves said further action against Rather was not warranted.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward kept his job. The panel said Heyward had explicitly urged caution before the report aired.

The report cited documents purported to be from one of Bush's commanders in the Texas Air National Guard. The documents say the commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, ordered Bush to take a medical exam and the future president. Killian also reportedly felt pressured to sugarcoat an evaluation of then 1st Lt. Bush.

Questions were quickly raised about the memo, with some document experts saying it appeared were written on a computer not invented at the time they were supposedly written.

The independent investigators — former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, retired president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press — said they could find no evidence to conclude the report aired two months before the election was fueled by a political agenda.

The network's drive to be the first to break a story about Bush's National Guard service was a key reason it produced a story that was neither fair nor accurate and did not meet CBS News' internal standards, the investigators said.

Although the panel said it couldn't prove conclusively the documents were forged, it said CBS News failed to authenticate them and falsely claimed an expert had done so when all he had done was authenticate one signature.

After questions were raised, CBS launched into a "strident defense" of its report without adequately probing whether the criticism was merited, compounding the damage, the panel said.

Howard was only months into his job as the executive responsible for "60 Minutes Wednesday," and gave too much deference to Mapes and Rather, the panel said in its 224-page report.

Two days after the report, Heyward ordered West to review the opinons of document examiners and confidential sources who had supported the story — but no such investigation was done.

"Had this directive been followed promptly, the panel does not believe that `60 Minutes Wednesday' would have publicly defended the segment for another 10 days," the panelists said.


While I do not believe that there was no political motive, I will give CBS credit for at least taking some sort of action against the 4. Too bad they gave Teflon Dan a free pass.

I did find it interesting that CBS News President Andy Heyward ordered an investigation early on, but West simply ignored the order.

__________________
A burning desire for social justice is never a substitute for knowing what you're talking about. -Thomas Sowell

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is muzzle flash.

 

MickityMike

Ah, the rise of true citizen journalism: the blogosphere!

Choke on it, Rather.

__________________
I'd be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons. - Glenn Reynolds

Hiz Highness

Good. Journalists and newsmen who lie need to be exposed as frauds and fired.

-HH

MickityMike

And then dragged out into the street and shot, right? Right?

Hiz Highness

That wouldn't leave many surviving FOX News people.
(We all remember the Dave Letterman fiasco. The kid wasn't really at Bush's speech. Well, he was there but not at that location. Well . . . uh . . . ok, we guess the kid was actually there.)

. . . so of course!



Seriously though, people rely on respected news organizations to be thorough in their reporting. We expect them to maintain journalistic integrity and thouroughly research what they report (I leave FOX out of this because I don't actually expect them to do any of that).

I rely on CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, etc to actually research and verify their stories so I don't have to. If it gets to the point where news organizations are just grabbing any ol' source for information and not doing anything to verify it's credibility we may as well pull our news from anonymous web blogs, it'll be just as accurate.

-HH

 

Stephanie S.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance. ~Will Rogers

One Ad is worth more to a paper than forty Editorials. ~Will Rogers

Will is my fave I wonder what he'd have to say today about the current climate of "journalism".

peace

__________________
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." —George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005 (Listen to audio)

Mamabudz

Myopic Zeal

...I LOVE new terms for screwing up!

I imagine a kid turning in a piece of crap term paper written in a half hour on the schoolbus the day it's due:

"But teach -- don't I get any points for my myopic zeal in getting this turned in on time ?"