Posted on 09/20/2004 7:57:38 PM PDT by NewMediaFan
After ten days at the center of a news media storm, Dan Rather and CBS News admitted yesterday that they could not authenticate four documents the network had used to raise new questions about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service and said the news report had been a "mistake in judgment."
Network officials said a former Texas National Guard officer had misled their producers about how he had obtained the documents, which came under scrutiny almost as soon as the network broadcast its report on the CBS Evening News and "60 Minutes" on Sept. 8. While CBS stopped short of calling the memos a fraud, it said that it could not now say for certain where the documents came from.
"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," said Andrew Heyward, the CBS News president. "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret." The network's admission tarnishes the reputation of what was once the nation's most prestigious broadcast news division. Just two weeks ago, its 72-year-old anchor, Mr. Rather, seemed to have one of the biggest stories of the campaign, in the twilight of his career.
Mr. Rather, who initially insisted the wide questioning of the documents-purportedly from the personal files of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Mr. Bush's squadron commander-came in large measure from partisans, delivered his own apology during his evening broadcast. "I want to say personally and directly I'm sorry,'' he said, adding, "This was an error made in good faith.''
The day's concessions were a sharp turnaround from more than a week ago, when CBS news officials and Mr. Rather, for decades the face of CBS news, were standing steadfastly by the report, dismissing days of charges from document experts that the records were fakes produced on a modern-day computer.
Network officials yesterday admitted that the person who had given them the documents had lied about where he got them, and that inconsistencies in the cloak-and-dagger account he had given them in the past few days had left CBS unable to say definitively where they came from. Moreover, CBS never contacted the person originally said to be the source.
In an interview broadcast on CBS last night, the former national guardsman who gave the memos to the network, Bill Burkett, acknowledged that he had lied. Mr. Burkett told Mr. Rather that he had felt pressure from CBS to reveal his source, and so ''simply threw out a name'' to explain how he had come by the documents. He insisted he had not forged them.
The network said it was appointing an outside panel of experts to review the process by which such a flawed report got onto the air, especially one with such potential implications for a sitting president some 50 days before an election. It said it would make the results public.
The network's admissions quickly reverberated on the campaign trail. Mr. Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan demanded that the source of the documents be found. Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee said that attention should still be paid to questions about whether Mr. Bush fulfilled his service obligations three decades ago.
In addition, Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, said he had talked to Mr. Burkett at the behest of a CBS producer, who had promised to help Mr. Burkett, an avid Bush opponent, relay some campaign advice. Mr. Lockhart said there was no connection between the campaign and the memos.
CBS News officials yesterday said "a perfect storm," of circumstances - including intense competition, faith in the reputation and judgment of a producer, and the reliance on a source with questionable integrity - had led to their journalistic lapse.
But there was dissension inside CBS news, according to a number of executives and producers interviewed, with some saying that Mr. Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, had simply relied too much on one dubious source. "These are not standards that would ever be tolerated,'' said Morley Safer, a correspondent on the sister "60 Minutes" Sunday program.
By the accounts of Mr. Rather and other officials, they began to understand their report was falling apart last Thursday, when Mr. Burkett confessed to CBS that he had lied about where he got the four memorandums. While he had initially said he got them from another former guardsman, people at CBS said, he then told them that the documents came through a convoluted process that started with a phone call from a stranger and ended with the handoff of an envelope at the Houston Livestock Show, that city's version of Mardi Gras.
Mr. Rather flew to Texas to interview Mr. Burkett on Saturday. By Sunday, the tapes were back in New York, and network officials say they knew they had a serious problem.
They said they had had a brief moment of hope when they believed they had deduced the name of a woman who might have called Mr. Burkett to offer him the documents. But on Monday, they were giving up on that lead, too.
"We couldn't confirm the new story - maybe it's true - but we can't confirm it,'' said one official at the network who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And in the meantime we're hanging out there, we have vouched for these things and we don't have anything to stand on. We've come to the moment where there's nothing to prove his story."
Mr. Rather and Ms Mapes, a respected producer whose credits include securing the photographs that led CBS to break the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal this spring, had been working on the story of Mr. Bush's National Guard Service since Mr. Bush's first presidential campaign. They knew that other reporters were working on the same story.
Mr. Bush's aides have repeatedly said that the president fulfilled his service obligations, but the official record left gaps, including questions about why Mr. Bush failed to take his pilot physical.
Mr. Rather said he and Ms. Mapes had heard that there were records that could fill that gap and, Mr. Rather said, "We worked it."
About 18 months ago, they came upon Mr. Burkett, who said he had overheard aides to Mr. Bush, then the governor of Texas, instructing National Guard officials to scrub Mr. Bush's file of anything embarrassing. Mr. Burkett went public with that account last February. "We accelerated our questioning," Mr. Rather said.
By mid-August, they did not have the documents. Around then, Gary Killian, whose father had been Mr. Bush's squadron commander, got a call from Ms. Mapes, asking if he knew where she might find memos his father had apparently written criticizing Mr. Bush's service. Gary Killian said that he and his stepmother both told Ms. Mapes they did not believe the elder Mr. Killian had kept such records, and that he had thought well of Mr. Bush.
The Friday before Labor Day, Mr. Rather said in an interview yesterday, he heard from others at the network that Ms. Mapes had the documents. He was in Florida covering Hurricane Frances, and flew to Texas to begin filming the segment.
In the course of their conversations with Mr. Burkett, the team had grown increasingly confident in his story, he said. Mr. Rather said they had called his friends and neighbors to get a sense of his credibility and were satisfied.
"I knew him before by telephone,'' Mr. Rather said, "and otherwise had checked out what his reputation was in the community that he lived, and even people who disliked him and had arguments with him, including Republicans and supporters of Bush. They all said he's a truth teller."
Mr. Rather said that Mr. Burkett had initially refused to say who gave him the documents, and that CBS pressured him to do so. "We made it clear that the chain of possession was very important to us," Mr. Rather said.
Mr. Rather recalled that Mr. Burkett had said he had gotten the documents from a former guard member who was now overseas. Mr. Rather said producers had tried to get in touch with him, but had not, though knowing his identity bolstered the team's confidence just the same.
"It was a person who could have had direct access to Killian's files," he said. "That made it believable."
A lawyer for Mr. Burkett, Gabe Quintanilla, said Monday that his client was given the documents at the livestock show in March, and kept them to himself because he did not know whether they were authentic.
"This is a simple West Texan middle-aged gentleman going along his own way when this happens to get dumped in his lap," the lawyer said.
After months of pressure from CBS, Mr. Quintanilla said: "He said I'll give these to you on the condition that you have them subjected to the highest scrutiny. Quite frankly, it's unfortunate that their job wasn't done on that end."
In a posting on an e-mail newsletter for Texas Democrats, Mr. Burkett wrote yesterday, "Don't believe everything you read - even from CBS."
The network's executives acknowledge that its team's failure to get in contact with the supposed primary source should have been a red flag. But they said they had remained confident because Ms. Mapes and Mr. Rather had such confidence in Mr. Burkett. They also believed their other reporting had affirmed the sentiments Colonel Killian supposedly expressed in the documents.
"We were completely confident from what we were hearing from Mary, and there was no reason not to trust her," said Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes" Wednesday edition.
The documents seemed to hand the network a huge scoop, purporting to document how Colonel Killian - who has been dead for 20 years - had felt pressure to "sugar coat" Mr. Bush's record because the young lieutenant, whose father was the ambassador to the United Nations, was "talking to someone upstairs." They indicated that Mr. Bush had been suspended from flying because he had not met guard standards, and had failed to appear for a physical examination.
Mr. Heyward said his confidence had first been significantly jolted when Mr. Killian's secretary, Marian Carr Knox, stepped forward to say that while she had typed similar memos about Mr. Bush for Mr. Killian, she believed that the CBS documents were fake. About the same time, Mr. Burkett admitted to Ms. Mapes that he had lied about the provenance of the document.
Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes persuaded Mr. Burkett to speak on camera. On Mr. Heyward's orders, one of his top deputies, Betsy West, who is responsible for overseeing "60 Minutes," accompanied Mr. Rather to Dallas for the interview, a four-hour session.
It was there that Mr. Burkett gave the tale of how a woman phoned him and told him that she could get documents to him if he could get himself to Houston.
Mr. Burkett, officials said, was believable in his delivery. But when researchers checked his past statements against a transcript of the interview, there were inconsistencies, executives said.
Officials convened at the CBS headquarters Sunday afternoon and decided they could hang on no longer.
Exactly right!
Does this statement imply that they no longer trust her? I think we may have found the first one to go.
The New York Times went with this story too. When are they going to publish a retraction and an apology for their part in promoting a slanderous forgery?
The suspicious rapidity with which the Times and the ComPost went with it suggests that they were a part of the conspiracy. It was not a "mistake" on any of their parts.
A livestock show is an excellent place to pick up some BS.
NO, not at all, but the simple fact that they would have to do it on National TV would be good enough for me. In fact I would record it and go sit in my favorite easy chair and drink a cold one while it loops over and over :-)
good old USA today couldn't be bothered themselves to LOOK up burkett's wild accusations against Dubya or his known history of 2 nervous breakdowns.
Someone on Little Green Footballs' weblog noted that the version of the documents from Fox News' website had a creation date in February 2004. Interestingly, the version on CBS' website had a September creation date.
"good old USA today couldn't be bothered themselves to LOOK up burkett's wild accusations against Dubya or his known history of 2 nervous breakdowns."
Actually USAT must have, because they received the same docs from Burkett as CBS but refused to run with the scoop. Burkett must have spooked them.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b4a2da51421.htm
Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe will spend two days next week whistle-stopping through Texas. His first stop will be in San Antonio on June 26 where he will attend an open house at the Bexar County Democratic Party headquarters.
At the time, Burkett's lawyer was the Democratic Party Bexar County Democratic Chairman.
Is the DNC now in control of what comes out of Burkett?
Saint Dan, the Memo Martyr: "I'm sorry.....that I got caught."
I swear, this gets more interesting by the minute.
I have been wondering why the MSM has not been so attack-oriented against CBS, especially since Rather and his cronies have compromised any claim they have to journalistic integrity. Could it be that they are concerned for their own lack of journalistic integrity?
If LGF is accurate, that means that Fox had access to these documents long before CBS and filed them away for safekeeping OR they've been around long before Burkett reportedly got them at a livestock show.
NOT good enough Blather....
You must apologize to the President, rat out the source and resign...
A nice touch would be a criminal indictment.
Semper Fi
His lawyer who last spoke for him was Van Os, running for the Texas Supreme Court and naturally active in Texas Dem politics. Van Os has pictures of himself with Cleland, Carville,etc.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1221097/posts
Bill Burkett: Steering Committee, Van Os for Texas Democratic Chair 2002
The Kerry Fairy ^ | 09/20/04 | Becki Snow
According to a post at Little Green Footballs (post no. 174 on the thread about the timestamps), someone alleges that he interviewed Burkett's former lawyer David Van Os, and that Van Os said Burkett was given a call in "the first week of February" by someone with experience in the Texas Air National Guard, telling him that they had come across these documents.
The poster's name is "rod".
It was in early February 2004 that Terry McAuliffe made his statements about President Bush having been AWOL during his service in the TANG.
I was just getting ready to post that! Great minds...
Too many questions here for my own good.
First, why did Burkett change lawyers? And isn't it interesting that Van Os was so chummy with Carville and Company?
Second, when did Burkett claim to receive these documents?
More in a minute...
"Actually USAT must have, because they received the same docs from Burkett as CBS but refused to run with the scoop. Burkett must have spooked them."
I was thinking about my reply and wondering something. Except for sharp-eyed Freepers in pj's and bloggers, did anyone see or hear MSM mention that USA Today received the same set of forged docs as CBS??? Is this an open secret? Why is this not generally known. Every MSM is coming down hard on CBS, but why not USA Today?? I don't understand this cover-up at all.
DUH!
Burkett reportedly got these documents at a livestock auction in June, and Terry McAuliffe is spewing forth in February...
That leads more credence to the idea that the DNC has been involved in the creation of the documents, doesn't it? Am I missing something here?
Hey! You may want to check with the admin mod before posting anything from the NY Times. Something about a lawsuit...
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