Free Republic

AFTER SPENDING THREE MONTHS ON an investigation that must have rung up hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable hours, the team of lawyers hired by CBS to investigate its scandalously spurious report about George W. Bush's long-ago National Guard service finally concluded last week that CBS shouldn't have aired the September 8 broadcast at all. Former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief Louis D. Boccardi, who led the investigative panel, declared that there had simply been too many questions about the veracity of the supposedly bombshell documents on which it relied. (Cont.)

CBS News is undoubtedly hoping that release of the Thornburgh/Boccardi Report, with its embarrassing admissions, will satisfy critics enough that the Rathergate scandal will be allowed to disappear into dim memory. They are wrong. Many observers, our own Clarice Feldman included, have been impressed by the extent of the incompetence (and worse) CBS has admitted with this internal report. Some, like Jim Geraghty, of National review Online, are concerned that critics of CBS should appear reasonable, and praise what is praiseworthy, while asking for more information, as a matter of political strategy. Already, Washington Post writers Howard Kurtz and Dana...

I, who never watch CBS News, spent yesterday afternoon, reading the lengthy Thornburgh/Boccardi Report. Within its considerable limitations, it is a fine, well-detailed view of the CBS TANG memo scandal. While it could have asked other questions, and utilized other investigative approaches (for example, analyzing the telephone records of various key individuals), given its methodology, it tells us quite a bit that is embarrassing to those who are paying for it. The Report reveals what most of us who don't watch network news already knew: CBS News is a shoddy operation all around, one more concerned with production values and...

John Podhoretz does a great job unpacking and re-assembling the information in the CBS Report, to show that: Mapes was not "focused on any particular event or topic." In other words, she had nothing to go on. And yet on she went, searching for a "viable story line." Mapes was on a gigantic fishing expedition. She was trying to bag a president. She did so with the consent and support of her superiors. With that aim in mind, she partnered up with one Michael Smith, a Texas journalist. Smith told her he had a "tasty brisket of information" to share...

Just heard from a person familiar with the network's inner workings that the report by ex-U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, former head of The Associated Press, may not be coming out until January. CBS News President Andrew Heyward said on September 20, 2004 that he hoped the panel will report in "weeks, not months." [Posted 12/10 01:54 PM]

NEW YORK (AP) -- CBS appoints former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief executive Lou Boccardi to investigate National Guard documents story.