Text 2430, 142 rader
Skriven 2004-09-20 05:15:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: CBS
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Misled and incompetent ...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/politics/campaign/20guard.html?ei=5006
&en=42f1be2f0a0efa9d&ex=1096344000&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print&p
osition=

September 20, 2004
THE NEWS MEDIA 
CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network 
Officials Say
By JIM RUTENBERG
 
After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 
Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's 
National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the 
authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most 
likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived 
about the documents' origins. CBS News has already begun intensive 
reporting on where they came from, and people at the network said it was 
now possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it 
moved forward with the report. Officials say they are now beginning to 
believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air.

But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an 
announcement. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who 
presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about 
the documents one last time before making a final decision. Mr. Rather 
was not available for comment late last night.

The report relied in large part on four memorandums purported to be from 
the personal file of Mr. Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. 
Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos, dated from the early 1970's, 
said that Colonel Killian was under pressure to "sugar coat'' the record 
of the young Lieutenant Bush and that the officer had disobeyed a direct 
order to take a physical.

Mr. Rather and others at the network are said to still believe that the 
sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings but 
that the documents' authenticity was now in grave doubt.

The developments last night marked a dramatic turn for CBS News, which 
for a week stood steadfastly by its Sept. 8 report as various document 
experts asserted that the typeface of the memos could have been produced 
only by a modern-day word processor, not Vietnam War-era typewriters.

The seemingly unflappable confidence of Mr. Rather and top news division 
officials in the documents allayed fears within the network and created 
doubt among some in the news media at large that those specialists were 
correct. CBS News officials had said they had reason to be certain that 
the documents indeed had come from the personal file of Colonel Killian.

Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said last week, "We are confident 
about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the 
documents.''

But officials decided yesterday that they would most likely have to 
declare that they had been misled about the records' origin after Mr. 
Rather and a top network executive, Betsy West, met in Texas with a man 
who was said to have helped the news division obtain the memos, a former 
Guard officer named Bill Burkett.

Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and several 
people close to the reporting process said his answers to Mr. Rather's 
questions led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that 
the memos had come from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These 
people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the 
piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material. 

It was unclear last night if Mr. Burkett had told Mr. Rather that he had 
been misled about the documents' provenance or that he had been the one 
who did the misleading.

In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Burkett declined to answer any 
questions about the documents.

Yesterday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the 
records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns 
about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in 
Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents 
said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail. 

In an interview last night she declined to name the producer who told 
her this but said the producer was in a position to know. CBS News 
officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the 
night before the initial "60 Minutes'' report that it would face 
questions from documents experts.

In the coming days CBS News officials plan to focus on how the network 
moved ahead with the report when there were warning signs that the 
memorandums were not genuine.

Ms. Will is one of two documents experts consulted by the network who 
said they raised doubts about the material before the segment was 
broadcast. Another expert, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he 
had vouched only for Colonel Killian's signatures on the records and not 
the authenticity of the records themselves. Mr. Matley said he could not 
rule out that the signatures had been cut and pasted from official 
records pertaining to Colonel Killian.

In examining where the network had gone wrong, officials at CBS News 
turning their attention to Ms. Mapes, one of their most respected 
producers, who was riding particularly high this year after breaking 
news about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for the network. 

In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive 
producer of the "60 Minutes'' Wednesday edition, said that he did not 
initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but 
that he did not see any reason to doubt them. He said he believed Ms. 
Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the 
documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt 
upon the essential thrust of the report.

"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day,'' 
he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has 
turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her 
credibility.''

He added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't 
completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis.''

Ms. Mapes has not responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Howard also said in the interview that the White House did not 
dispute the veracity of the documents when it was presented to them on 
the morning of the report. That reaction, he said, was "the icing on the 
cake'' of the other reporting the network was conducting on the 
documents. White House officials have said they saw no reason to 
challenge documents being presented by a credible news organization. 

Several people familiar with the situation said they were girding for a 
particularly tough week for Mr. Rather and the news division should the 
network announce its new doubts. 

One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, 
"Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?''

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