Apologizing for a "mistake in judgment" in its story questioning President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News said Monday it was misled by the source of documents that many experts
[Hurray for the PajamaHadeen and especially for Charles Johnson of littlegreenfootballs and PowerLine blog!--Jen]
have singled out as fakes.
The network said it would appoint an independent panel to look at its reporting about the memos.
[As if they didn't know already!]
The story has mushroomed into a major media scandal, threatening the reputations of CBS News and chief anchor Dan Rather.
It also has become an issue in the presidential campaign. The White House said the affair raises questions about the connections between CBS' source — retired Texas [Army] National Guard officer Bill Burkett — and Democrat John Kerry's campaign.
[Ed. note: There's a difference between the Texas Air National Guard, in which President Bush served, and the Texas Army National Guard, in which Burkett apparently served.--J.T.]
Rather joined CBS News President Andrew Heyward in issuing an apology Monday.
[...]
Almost immediately after the story aired Sept. 8, document experts questioned memos purportedly written by Bush's late squadron leader, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, saying they appeared to have been created on a computer and not on the kind of typewriter in use during the 1970s.
[Doesn't CBS and Dan owe Jerry Killian (or at least his surviving family members an apology for needlessly maligning their father and husband?
And what about an apology to President Bush while they're at it?!--Jen]
CBS strongly defended its story. It wasn't until a week later — after Killian's former secretary said she believed the memos were fake — that the news division admitted they were questionable.
[And wasn't this poor old dear convincing...asserting that the memos were "fake, but accurate?"]
*****
Burkett admitted this weekend to CBS that he lied about obtaining the documents from another former National Guard member, the network said. CBS hasn't been able to conclusively tell how he got them, or even definitely tell whether they're fakes or not. But the network has given up trying to defend them.
[Ya don't think old Bill Burkett cooked these "memos" up himself on his little old computer, then printed them out and faxed the result from his local Abilene Kinko's to the DNC Kerry Campaign CBS News, do you? 'Cause I do!]
CBS said it approached Burkett initially about the documents.
[This is one of the key things about this whole incident that's striking: CBS called Burkett, not vice versa!]
Rather said Burkett was well known in National Guard circles for several years for trying to discredit Bush's military record.
Burkett, in an interview with Rather aired on the "CBS Evening News," said he was pressured by CBS to reveal his source for the documents, and "I simply threw out a name that was basically, I guess, to get a little pressure off for the moment."
He said he didn't fake or forge any documents.
"I didn't totally mislead you," he said. "I did mislead you about one individual."
[Would that individual be the President, perchance?]
Burkett said he also insisted that CBS authenticate the documents on its own.
[And apparently, "CBS" was OK with that. Hmmm.]
Two document experts consulted by CBS later said they raised red flags that network officials apparently disregarded. Rather acknowledged CBS failed to properly determine whether the documents were genuine.
"'60 Minutes Wednesday' had full confidence
[What in the H-E-Double-hockey-sticks does that mean?!]
in the original report or it would not have aired," Heyward said in a statement.
"However, in the wake of serious and disturbing questions that came up after the broadcast, CBS News has done extensive additional reporting in an effort to confirm the documents' authenticity. … 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. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret. Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable, and independent reporting. We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust."
[Isn't it a little late for them to be worried about restoring or retaining their credibility, now that it's so obvious they shouldn't have any!]
Rather himself also issued a written statement, saying, "I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically," adding that airing the documents was an "error in judgment."
"I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers," Rather continued. "That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where — if I knew then what I know now — I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question."
[To put it plainly to Dan: BULLSH*T.
I think that Dan and Co. knew perfectly well from the start that the docs were phony and that the lies about President Bush's service contained therein were nothing but sheer smears which they hoped to use to influence the American public to vote against Bush, coming as the story did 2 months before the election.
Not only were they going to use these memos to put forward the allegation that Bush was a liar who served dishonorably, in conjunction with the DNC's "Fortunate Son" ad campaign, but the Leftist MSM was hoping to build on the "liar" thing and connect it to the present day and Bush's "lies" to the American people as President.
Despiccable. (And no, I don't mean it to sound silly, like Daffy Duck.)
It truly is despicable.
Don't forget that these forged memos also went hand-in-hand with Ben Barnes's "testimony" that President Bush used his family connections to get in the "cushy" National Guard and to "get out of" having to fight in combat in Vietnam.
Ben Barnes, presented as a "troubled by conscience" good guy on "60 Minutes II," has also been thoroughly discredited--by among other people, his own daughter!--and yet everyone's forgotten Barnes's smears in the nuclear fallout from Memogate.]
The original CBS report mainly relied on four memos purportedly written by Killian. Dated in the early 1970s, the papers say that Killian was pressured to "sugarcoat" the young Lt. Bush's record and that Bush ignored a direct order to take a physical.
[We've been over this and over this many times.
For those of us in Texas, this makes the 4th time and the 4th election that the Left has tried to malign Bush's honorable service in the Texas Air National Guard.
Lt Bush didn't have to take a physical because the type of plane he was flying was being taken out of active use and he no longer needed a physical to qualify to fly it because no Guardsmen were flying it.]
"It's about time. I think CBS is the last group in America that doesn't understand these are forgeries — and really abusive forgeries," former Republican National Committee Chairman Bill Brock told FOX News after the statement was released. "Hallelujah they are finally admitted they were wrong and I hope they will be very forthcoming about their source and that they were duped."
The president was told about the CBS statement while aboard Air Force One.
"We appreciate that they deeply regret this, but there are still questions to be answered," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with the president,
[Right on, Scott, and we want those answers and we want them now!]
adding that Burkett has in the past been discredited and has had senior-level contacts with the Kerry campaign, which raise serious questions.
"Where I come from, if you make a mistake or spread lies or allegations, you damn well better apologize to the guy you're offending. In my opinion, they owe the president of the United States an apology directly," Joe Allbaugh, who served as chief of staff for then-Gov. George Bush, told FOX News Monday after CBS released its statement.
"They [CBS] were trying to directly, with false information, affect the outcome of this presidential election. Someone needs to pay the price," Allbaugh added.
Top CBS executives huddled throughout the weekend and refined the wording of its correction and apology throughout Monday morning.
"This is a fact of CBS being used by a wide wrap of Democratic operatives," Terry Holt, a senior RNC adviser, told FOX News.
"I think that [Democratic Party Chairman] Terry McAuliffe, John Kerry — they've been at the heart of a wide range of groups over the past several months designed to attack the president and take him down and I think that's unfortunate."
Holt opined that the Kerry camp was "desperate to find any way they could to change the subject" from the Vietnam swift boat tangle it found itself in after some Vietnam vets charged that Kerry exaggerated some stories of valor from the war and that he didn't deserve all his war medals.
[And yet, all the Liberal MSM, not just CBS, continue to focus on President Bush's TANG service and refuse to address the Swift Boat Veterans' charges on their merits or to demand that Kerry release his military and medical records.]
"They had motive, they had opportunity and they definitely had desperation," Holt added.
CBS went into a "defensive crouch" and should have acknowledged sooner the possibility they were duped, Richard Cohen, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, told FOX News on Monday.
[Cohen's no Bush fan, either, and he's another media shill for the DNC, so it must be pretty clear to all of them what's transpired and now the rest of the DNC propaganda machine is trying to get distance from Rather and pretend that they're more "honest" and "objective" in a hurry. Too late!]
But "I essentially think it's a tempest in the teapot — it was a mistake … all news organizations make mistakes … if they're aggressive and really care about covering the news … it's part of the business."
Some Democratic insiders, however, point out that despite the source of the documents, CBS is standing by its contents and the fact that few are disputing the inconsistencies described in Bush's military record.
"There's still a ton of unanswered questions by this president about his military service," such as whether he got enough points for an honorable discharge, as questioned by The New York Times in a Monday article, said Democratic consultant Jenny Backus.
[Just to put a tent on the circus, Terry McAwful joined in this chorus late Monday, too:
Democrats insist Bush still lied about his service
President Bush doesn't lie and he's not lying about this. It's against his religion...literally! And the American people know that he tells them the truth instinctually. But the Dims just don't get the whole "truth" thing at all.]
"I think the thing that we need to look at … is the pattern inside this White house and this president in terms of their credibility … and how they're talking about this Guard story and how they're talking about the war in Iraq today … he has not answered any questions about where he was that year" or in Iraq today, she added.
Adding more fuel to the fire, Burkett, who lives in Abilene, Texas, has now also said that he passed the documents on to former Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat and triple amputee from Vietnam, who is working with the Kerry campaign. Burkett also has urged Democratic activists to wage "war" against Republican "dirty tricks."
[...presumably by using their own dirty tricks.
*Update: As of late Monday night, it was being reported that Joe Lockhart
had also "just talked" to Burkett before the memos were aired on TV, in addition to Cleland.
There's a fire behind this smoke, I guar-an-tee.
We should be all over the Kerry Campaign/CBS connection like white on rice.
And while we're at it, wouldn't this constitute CBS giving an entire hour of programming to the Kerry campaign as "free" advertising?
Where's the FCC, FEC and McCain-Feingold on that?
I wanna know and I know you do, too!]
Burkett's had a long-running feud with Bush over health benefits and the Texas National Guard. Bob Hunter, a Republican legislator who investigated Burkett's charges, told FOX News he found them to be groundless.
Over the weekend, Bush commented publicly on the issue for the first time.
"There are a lot of questions about the documents, and they need to be answered," he told The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H. The president has continued to maintain that he is proud to have served in the Guard.
The Bush-Cheney campaign has maintained that Kerry campaign staffers are behind the memo snafu.
[And I maintain that they're right, too!]
"The timing is not in question and the coordinated effort by the Democrats and the Kerry campaign to use these old recycled attacks is not in question," McClellan said.
I got busy yesterday afternoon (It was "Digital Brownshirt Day" at my house but the dress code is "pajamas" every day!) and wrote emails to the entire crew of "60 Minutes" (naming Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace, Leslie Stahl and Mary Mapes), to Tim Russert and Chris Matthews at
NBC, and to the local CBS affiliate and demanded that they take a stand against Dan Rather's use of forged memos to smear the sitting President during wartime less than 2 months before the election.
I urge you to do the same and don't let your local affiliate beg off that they "have to" give their audience the CBS Network feed.
And don't let on-air personalities like Russert, Matthews, Jennings, Brokaw and CNN's crew off the hook because they work for other networks!
This isn't just about CBS or Dan Rather--Memogate is an exposure of the Liberal Bias of the entire MainStreamMedia, make no mistake!
Let's quit watching and boycott their advertisers and see where that gets us if they don't stop patronizing us with their mindless partisan agenda and bias that they've been passing off as "news" for years.
designed to help the Democrat Party get political power and stay in power and they're using
I hope that the fallout from this bomb has just begun and that it will continue.
Wasn't Ms. Mapes also behind the Abu Ghraib "story?" Oh, yes!
And didn't "60 Minutes" bring us those stalwarts of American security Amb. Joe Wilson and Richard Clarke (who also had a forthcoming book published by CBS's parent company Viacom)?
I believe they did.
Don't forget: we've already had to jump ugly on CBS 10 months ago when they tried to show that "mockumentary" about President and Mrs. Reagan.
Let's pump up the volume and let the Media know they've lied to us for the last time!
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