Who Killed CBS?
By Marni Soupcoff
In the wake of serious wrongdoing, expert panels don't tend to provide a lot of comfort. So, it was with little enthusiasm that I greeted stories of an independent panel's findings about CBS.
That's grand, I thought, they'll dismiss the network's false story about Bush as nothing to worry about. It turns out I was overly pessimistic. The panel's report about CBS's reliance on forged documents has some worthwhile things to say.
One of my favorite observations is the "myopic zeal" the panel identifies as causing CBS's inaccurate report. A close second is the panel's condemnation of CBS's "rigid and blind" defense of its report. The panel has not shied away from casting mild blame.
It concludes that many responsible for the National Guard story have "disregard[ed] some fundamental journalistic principles." It even faults producer Mary Mapes for telephoning a senior Kerry campaign official before the story aired. This was, in the report's words, "a clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias."
A complete whitewash, then, the panel's report is not. The reality, though, is that the report is still frustratingly unwilling to connect the obvious dots.
Take the forged documents at the heart of the controversy. While the panel makes clear CBS didn't do enough to verify their authenticity, it won't call them forgeries. That's an awfully weak stand given the documents' known discrepancies.
How, one wonders, can the panel explain the evidence of modern word processing the documents bear? Does the panel think the pages the innocent creations of a divine prankster dedicated to Microsoft Word?
If the papers aren't early '70s documents ordering Dubya to show up for a physical, they're phonies. It's as simple as that. And surely former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, who led the CBS investigation, know it.
But they would rather politely stop short of calling the forgeries what they are. They are similarly unwilling to take the culpable CBS crew to task for having an ideological bias. The panel explained that it "cannot conclude that a political agenda at '60 Minutes Wednesday' drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content."
I suspect most outsiders would have no such trouble reaching that conclusion, given Mary Mapes's aforementioned call to the Kerry campaign. But I suppose it might strike the panel as unseemly to "out" fellow members of the media. It is easier to dismiss the debacle as bad journalism than to address pervasive liberal bias.
If the problem is people not doing their jobs, firings and resignations do the trick. (CBS terminated Mary Mapes and asked three other employees to resign as a result of the report.)
But if the problem is a news staff with a desire to get one candidate elected over another.... Well then, suddenly the solutions are not nearly so clear-cut. I can only imagine that is why Thornburgh and Boccardi steered clear of the bias hot potato.
Yet by doing so, they have done their contracting employer CBS a significant disservice. Did the network really want to know what caused the airing of a bogus news story?
It's impossible to know for sure. But if CBS did--which seems likely if only for reasons of self-preservation--it didn't get its money's worth. The independent panel told only half (maybe a quarter) of the story, leaving out the crucial bits about CBS News' lack of neutrality and a network political culture that could allow such a poorly investigated story to run.
Instead of ideological bias, the panel seems to have focused on the "competitive pressure" that it believes prevented cooler heads from prevailing and calling for more vetting of sources to establish the authenticity of the Bush segment. But competitive pressure hardly explains CBS's stubborn insistence on sticking by its flawed story long after it was clear to everyone else that there was no more truth to the Bush "scoop" than to the latest tabloid story of aliens landing in Iowa or a baby being born with seven heads.
A strong emotional dislike of George W. Bush and all that Republicans stand for, on the other hand, far better explains the network's unwillingness to budge in the face of hard facts. And until CBS addresses that endemic political bias, no amount of well-meaning reforms (the panel has suggested many, including appointing a senior "standards and practices" executive) will make a bit of difference.
Shortly after Rathergate broke, I received an email message arguing that the National Guard story scandal proved once and for all that Dan Rather had killed CBS news. In the wake of the recent report, I would tweak that theory slightly.
With his participation in and defense of the bogus Bush story, the partisan Dan Rather may have delivered CBS News a crushing blow. But it was the independent panel unable to recommend an appropriate remedy that has finished them off.
Marni Soupcoff's column appears on Monday at TAEmag.com.
