September 18, 2004

LA TIMES Article Opens Up Can of Whoopass on Dan Rather

There are two articles in the LA TIMES today on Rathergate. The front-page one reports that the documents are widely believed to be forgeries; but amazingly doesn’t say why. It doesn’t mention anything about proportional fonts being unavailable in the 1970s. The readers are left scratching their heads, wondering what all the fuss is about.

However, there’s another article in the Calendar section by Tim Rutten. This one pulls no punches:

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.

None of this kept Rather from repeatedly going on the air and defending the memoranda’s authenticity. One might have thought that his defense reached a low point when he aired an interview with Killian’s 86-year-old former secretary in which she said she did not believe the documents were authentic but that they did accurately reflect what was happening with Bush at the time.

Truth through forgery now there’s a novel concept.

Rather, meanwhile, told the New York Times on Thursday, “This story is true. I believe in the authenticity of the documents.”

And there you have it: faith-based reporting.

...Inevitably, bad things happen to good news organizations. The test of a serious journalistic enterprise is how it reacts to internal crisis.

The Los Angeles Times had its Staples Center scandal; the Washington Post Janet Cooke’s fabricated Pulitzer Prize-winner; the New York Times had Jayson Blair; and USA Today, Jack Kelley. In each instance, the organization immediately and exhaustively investigated what had gone wrong and put the findings in their entirety before their readers. CNN did precisely the same thing after its so-called Tailwind scandal, as did NBC in 1992, when its “Dateline” newsmagazine was caught broadcasting staged events.

Thus far, no such action has been undertaken by CBS executives, which is worse than inexplicable.

...the real media story of the 2004 presidential campaign may not be bias but incompetence.

Attaching that adjective to CBS is a melancholy obligation. This, after all, is the house that Edward R. Murrow built. Anyone mindful of the legacy that keen and fearless man left to his network would want to make a tragedy of all this with Rather, Lear-like, roaring on the moors. But it isn’t that; what CBS has spun out over the last week is not drama but shabby farce. Rather and his network’s executives resemble nothing so much as the doddering, penniless inhabitants of some crumbling old pile, lurking behind curtains and muttering increasingly incoherent excuses to the bill collectors pounding at their door.

Holy cow.

CBS’ initial report on President Bush’s National Guard service was an embarrassment to Murrow’s legacy. But the implications of that mistake pale alongside the potential consequences of the network’s continuing refusal to do what the situation now demands: to forthrightly admit error, to undertake an independent inquiry and, then, to give a clear public accounting of how this happened. If the current custodians of CBS News willfully refuse to keep faith with their viewers, they will have disgraced Murrow’s memory.

That is definitely a whole 6-pack of whoopass.