The Collapse of Network News

Respect for the truth is not marked by always being accurate, but by a perpetual willingness, even an eagerness, to correct past errors. It has become clear to everyone whose eyes have not been crusted shut by partisan pinkeye, that the documents CBS offered as evidence that National Guard officers were pressured to sugar coat then Lt. George W. Bush's records and that Bush disobeyed a direct order to report for a physical, were forgeries. There are a number of technical issues with regard to font and spacing that indicate that the papers were almost certainly not produced by the common typewriters used by the National Guard at the time. Further, the documents mentioned pressure by General Staudt on behalf of the young lieutenant. Other records now show that the general had retired more than a year earlier than the date of the memo. CBS claims they were working on the story for five years. It took less than five days to undermine the evidentiary foundation of CBS's report.

If we presume no deliberate maliciousness, what becomes evident, even from this distance, is that reporters and producers at CBS believed or wanted to believe these negative Bush stories so much that they lost their ordinary journalistic skepticism. Now it could be argued that there is not a sufficient ideological diversity on the staff of CBS News that could have acted as a check to this unintentional partisan enthusiasm. Nonetheless, it is extremely unlikely that anyone at CBS consciously decided to use documents they knew were forged.

CBS's gravest error was not the initial mistake of makingpolitically explosive accusations based on forged documents less than two months from an election, but its intransigence to take seriously legitimate questions by known document experts. Given the initial questions about the authenticity of documents, CBS should have been the first to launch an independent assessment of the documents and make the earliest generation of the documents available to other independent news organizations. Stonewalling against criticism does convey openness to truth.

The wife and son of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, the purported author of the memos, said that Killian would not have written such documents and that the statements in the documents were inconsistent with opinions the late Lt. Col. voiced to both his wife and son. Now it is possible that CBS could have still judged the documents authentic, but they did have a journalistic responsibility to inform viewers that the some people close to Lt. Col. Killian doubted the documents. The experts consulted by CBS also had serious doubts about the documents, yet CBS did not convey this uncertainty to the viewers.

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