The Memogate Report

Hat Tip: RatherBiased.com, who obtained a copy of the report and served it up to the Web for all to see. (Note: You will need a viewer of Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf) files. The Adobe Reader is available on all platforms as both a stand-alone application and a browser plug-in. Other operating systems, including Linux distros, often come with their own PDF viewing applets.)

I know I come late to this issue, and right now I've read little beyond the report's Executive Summary. Like others who have commented on this report already, I find that the report does not go as far as the facts warrant. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether the Memogate Panel had to tread carefully when describing the behavior of the principals in the Killian Memoranda Fiasco in order to protect Viacom, Inc., CBS, Inc., and CBS News from criminal--yes, criminal--liability. (If you knowingly use forged documents that relate to someone's service in the military or any reserve or similar auxiliary thereof, you are guilty of a federal felony.)

But this report will be very difficult for the principals to defend, and I can well understand why Mary Mapes issued the very snippy statement that followed her notice-of-termination. (Hat tip for this one: Little Green Footballs. And let's give them a heroes' welcome-back, after they finally recovered from a Distributed Denial-of-service Attack.)

So why is Mary Mapes so angry--other than that she just got fired and is in fact the scape-nanny and fall gal for this whole scheme? This might be why: Messrs. Thornburgh and Boccardi said that even if the Killian Memoranda are not forgeries (and they're not officially sure that they aren't), Mary Mapes and her team broke every rule in the book by rushing to air with them without knowing clearly where they came from. Furthermore, even if you assume that Mapes, Rather, et al. have no political bias, they made it look that way by calling someone connected to the Kerry campaign, a telephone call that, it would seem, no self-respecting journalist would ever make. And in sum, this report clearly says that the conduct of Mapes et al. is simply not up to proper journalistic standards.

And why did they do this? According to Thornburgh and Boccardi, Rather, Mapes, Andy Heyward, and all the brass at CBS News just wanted to be first with what they thought was news. Then then engaged in a "rigid and blind defense" of the original segment "despite numerous indications of its shortcomings." In other words, even Thornburgh and Boccardi could not completely sugar-coat the worst aspect of this disgraceful affair: that CBS flew in the face of the evidence that they had rushed to air with documents whose authenticity was in serious doubt. And that's even assuming that any village idiot still believes that those documents are real. (I refer you to LGF and their links for definitive proof that those documents are not real.)

The lesson of Memogate, then, would appear to be that even apart from the question of whether the documents are forged, and whether Mary Mapes and Dan Rather were letting their biases blind them to reality (or whether they engineered the forgeries themselves, as I was ready to believe until I heard more about Bill Burkett's background), journalism has certain lines that you do not cross if you want people to respect you and your work. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes crossed those lines. That's why Dan Rather announced his intention to step down from the anchor desk, and that's why Mary Mapes just got fired and three other mid-level executives at CBS News were asked to resign. (And it's why Les Moonves, the head of CBS, ought to ask Andy Heyward to resign as well, if he really knows what's good for his company and its shattered image--though, by all indications, he won't unless some renegade shareholders "resolve" to force him so to act.)

My fellow bloggers, however, have concentrated on the things the report did not say, though incredibly it contains clear evidence to support some even more damning conclusions. To reply to the worst omission: the Memogate Panel refuses to conclude that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes had political motives to do what they did. They then go on to say that if Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were politically motivated, then so too are a lot of other media organs--in short, "all of mainstream media." And since the Panel did not have an assignment to examine the political motives of all the MSM, the Panel refuses even to consider the question. Unfortunately, the Panel seems to have forgotten this key point: "everybody else is doing it" is never a defense. The issue is not and never was whether CBS was more, or less, biased than any other MSM organ, but whether it showed a bias at all and let that bias cloud its journalistic judgment to any degree whatsoever. The answer to that relevant question has to be "Yes." The report's own exhibits make no other conclusion possible. Indeed the report admits four specific pieces of evidence of political motives:

1. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes pursued this story for five years.
2. All their sources had an anti-Bush bias, and everyone knew it.
3. Rather and Mapes intended to use clips of an interview with a Colonel Hackworth, who had nothing original to contribute. Even the Panel had a problem with that one.
4. Finally, Mapes contacted persons connected with the Kerry campaign, calls that she never should have made just because of how such a thing looks.

And yet, for all that, the Panel won't conclude that Rather and Mapes had any political motive. They give three reasons that they think are countervailing:

1. Rather and Mapes have done tough stories on other people, Republicans and Democrats both. Well, maybe--but not anything like what they tried to do on Bush.
2. "The editing process added balance." In other words, other hands than those of Rather and Mapes handled the footage and notes. So what? If everyone in the organization shares the biases of the producer and reporter, what assurance do we really have that "unbalanced" clips will land on the cutting-room floor?
3. Last of all--and this, I'm sure, has my conservative colleagues most furious--the Panel says that if those documents are authentic, then they really put the President in a bad light, and in a way that the American people deserve to know about. Well, that's fine as far as it goes. But when you use documents that anyone can reproduce by batting them out on a modern word processor, and you don't recognize that, you have a problem. And when you knowingly use a forged document, you have an even worse problem.

Then we come to the Panel's recommendations--the "what-happens-now." The Panel says that CBS News needs an omnibus censor--a "Standards Executive"--who will report directly to the president of CBS News and will have a staff large enough to vet every single segment of 60 Minutes Wednesday (and maybe other CBS News shows as well) for strict adherence to generally accepted journalism standards--in other words, a policeman to guard the line and tell people never to step across. To be fair, they go so far as to say that the chief censor's first job should be to review the existing Manual on Standards and Practices to see what other boundaries he ought to set.

That sounds fine as far as it goes. But again I ask: what if everyone in the organization shares the same bias? What will happen on the day that Dan Rather's successor (and CBS still hasn't found one) browbeats the chief censor into letting something through that doesn't meet the standards? But worse than that: Dan Rather frankly admitted that he asked Andrew Heyward to hold his hand throughout this process. Now if you're a news division president, and someone--and I don't give an unripe fig who it is--comes to you and says that he wants you to stand by him in something sensitive, do you not say, "I'll stand up for you, I'll put my reputation on the line for you, but you'd better be right--because if you aren't, and you make me look bad, I'll have your hide"? And if someone brings you a segment with such a flimsy basis, do you not say right away, "Don't you dare go to air with that! What are you thinking?" In view of that particular failure--and the spectacle of Andrew Heyward remaining in his job--what good will it do to create another position for another flunky of the president, except to set that person up to take the fall next time?

Read the report for yourselves, of course--that's why I linked to it. But I decided not to watch CBS News ever again after I heard about the forgeries. (And lo and behold, Dan Rather didn't even show up for work last night! Bob Schieffer had to stand in for him, saying lamely, "Hello, I'm Bob Schieffer; Dan Rather will be back tomorrow"--totally begging the question of where Dan Rather was and why he wasn't at that desk.) I have seen nothing in this report that would inspire in me the confidence I would need to watch The CBS Evening News again, or to recommend it to others. And if this is what I can expect from a major news organ that gets caught like this, then I guess I won't be watching any network news for a long time to come.