CBS & The Bush - TANG Documents

Well, the jury has come back in and it looks like the appropriate spankings have been, or will be, administered.

In a nutshell:

After the brouhaha over the Bush National Guard memos cited in a CBS 60 Minutes episode in September, CBS News asked former Bush I Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former AP President Louis Boccardi to look into the forgery allegations and determine exactly what led to the airing of dubious material.

Upon the release of the findings, a 234-page report, CBS canned four employees (excluding Rather, who had already announced plans to step down later this year). The employees are Mary Mapes (no surprise there), the producer of the segment; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy; Senior Vice President Betsy West, who oversaw CBS News primetime programs.

The findings make several recommendations regarding improvments in protocols future newsgathering:

• CBS News should establish a protocol for stories that require authentication of any materials, including documents, videotapes, recordings, and photographs. Such a protocol could identify experts, vetted in advance, who might be called on to assist with authentication.

• The same standards for accuracy and fairness prescribed by CBS News’ Standards Manual for its news stories should be applied to its press releases and public statements. That did not consistently occur here, as our Report on the Aftermath illustrates. CBS News management and the CBS Communications Group should coordinate their efforts and develop a protocol that accomplishes this objective.

• Where chain of custody is an issue, the Executive Producer, Senior Broadcast Producer and Standards Executive must be provided evidence that the chain of custody is established before the material is aired or, at a minimum, viewers must be told that the chain of custody has not been or could not be confirmed.

• CBS News personnel should be reminded regularly to check with the CBS News Archives group, particularly on investigative stories, to determine whether information about sources or other relevant background information might be available.

Couple points:

The report makes it clear that they were unable to determine whether the Killian documents were forgeries or were legit. The majority of the questions they raised had to do with the format and/or language in various parts of the Killian memos "varying from standard" formatting and/or wording in use at the time. I, personally, think that the docs probably are bogus - but, as this episode should have taught us, there's a world of difference between "think" and "know."

The panel also concluded that a) evidence clearly indicated that the report was not the result of a political bias, b) the editing process was performed to add "balance" to the story and c) the segment addressed some items pertaining to Bush’s TANG service record that were not previously known and thus could be considered newsworthy.

This leads to the most important point of all, and one which has been completely lost in the noise over the Killian memos: Regardless of the origin of the documents, the facts and circumstances were accurate. If you're interested and have the time to kill, here's an excellent reference guide to the whole Guard timeline, complete with details of what's missing, what's accurate, and what was hidden but has subsequently come to light.

Yeah, CBS News got sloppy on this story - and I hate sloppy in a news organization.

Yeah, heads should have rolled - perhaps especially Mary Mapes'.

But paraphrasing Marion Knox, Col. Killian's former secretary, the docs may have been bogus but the facts in 'em were not. And that's a fact.

The only real question which remains unanswered is, who is Lucy Ramirez... and what's her relationship, if any, to this Administration?