Public Eye
Public Eye, the CBS News blog, addresses Rathergate, the fake documents, and Mary Mapes' obsession in a single post. It's a thoughtful post that's worth a read.
It addresses the role of political bias and unprofessional obsession on the part of producer Mary Mapes, and admits that the docs were probably fake and that it was up to CBS to authenticate them before airing them. It also admits that CBS' response was less than forthcoming and far less than honorable.
But the post has a couple of shortcomings. For instance, admitting that politics played a role in the network's crashing the story to air doesn't really lift up the biggest rock, which is intent. The story aired within a few weeks of the election. It smeared a sitting president who was up for re-election, based on the word of a well known Bush hater who was known to be unreliable. That Bush hater, Bill Burkett, has ties to Travis County DA Ronnie Earle, and through him to Robin Rather, Dan Rather's own politically active (Democrat, natch) daughter. Earle is best known lately for indicting Republican Tom DeLay on bogus campaign finance charges and for keeping a pet leftwing activist/filmmaker at his side for the past two years to document the DeLay investigation. This is a nest of extremist Democrats tied to the Rathergate story and the DeLay shenanigans. Coincidentally (or not?) Earle's second indictment of DeLay was based on forged evidence. He fabricated a list of candidates that were supposed to benefit from the corporate money DeLay supposedly laundered via the RNC. But no such real list exists, or if it does Earle doesn't have it. So he made one up.
Just like Bill Burkett or "Lucy Ramirez" made up the documents that supposedly showed that Bush disobeyed a direct order during his time in the National Guard. There's a pattern here, and there's obvious intent--forging evidence to affect elections and politics in favor of Democrats by taking down powerful Republicans. Public Eye's post never gets into any of this (which is admittedly off the beaten path a little bit), but more importantly never addresses intent. It wasn't myopic zeal or excessive competition that drove CBS to air that story based on fake documents. CBS' journalists intended to effect the presidential election, and someone forged documents in pursuit of that goal and CBS aired those documents without authenticating them. We don't know who forged those documents, and if anyone within CBS does know they owe it to the country to fess up. Nevertheless, the forgery should be the subject of a criminal investigation. Forgery is a crime, as is wire fraud. The docs were faxed to CBS from Texas. The documents formed the basis of a disinformation campaign against a sitting president in a time of war. That rock needs turning over by bigger hands than this humble blog.
Public Eye's Rathergate post is a good step for CBS. It doesn't by itself rehabilitate CBS' reputation--how could it? But it's a move in the right direction. I do doubt that CBS and Dan Rather would have dug in as hard as they did to defend the story if Public Eye had been around to ask hard questions from the inside.
(thanks to Mike)