Take Fallout Shelter, Everyone!

It's not enough merely to observe that four employees at CBS News got fired yesterday over the Killian Memoranda. NewsMax.com has multiple articles on the continuing aftermath.

First up: Andy Rooney's protest that "the real culprits escaped." For once I agree with him. Andy Heyward ought to be fired for letting the segment go to air when Dan Rather specifically came to him for handholding--and frankly, Les Moonves is no great shakes as a media-company executive, either. But I don't expect Andy Rooney to understand one-tenth of my reasons for saying that both men ought to go--and Dan Rather ought to go completely, and have nothing further to do with CBS at all.

Next up: CBS News' ratings are lower than ever, and are getting lower. When everyone realized that Dan Rather had rushed to air with forged documents (whether he knew this or not), people stopped watching, and they haven't resumed watching. And they're not likely to. No one wants to feel that you've been lying to them, even if they agree with you. At the very least, they'll want to be able to cite a source that a conservative opponent--I, for example--might have a harder time impeaching, because at least the new source hasn't been involved in fabricating a story. Well, let me correct that: ABC and NBC have never been caught fabricating a story--though NBC did get caught exaggerating a product-liability issue beyond any rational estimate, several years ago. And by the way: Rush Limbaugh was wrong when he said today that CBS doesn't give a rip about their ratings. For the first time, CBS has had to grant free commercial time on its other shows to its CBS News advertisers, to compensate them for the diminished viewership of the news shows. This might not be a direct money cost, but it is an opportunity cost, and one that CBS would just as soon not had to absorb.

Though I have no specific word on recriminations for the lost advertising revenue in CBS' other divisions, I now learn, again from NewsMax.com, that the recriminations at the news division continue and are getting more rancorous than ever. Andrew Heyward, the head of the news division, now accuses Dan Rather of letting him down. This goes to one other criticism I have of that Memogate Report: it makes Dan Rather out to be an empty suit. Not true! says Heyward, who told the Memogate Panel that Dan Rather had told him that he'd been heavily involved in the vetting, more so than on any story since Watergate. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I know hearsay when I hear it. And I say that it's a poor network division president who finds himself reduced to repeating hearsay. And why didn't the Panel re-interview both men as soon as they told two different stories?

Last of all, the Republican National Chairman just weighed in:

CBS deserves praise for undertaking this effort in light of the concerns raised last fall. We should remember that today's report would not have come about without a vigilant public and also recognize that the vast majority of journalists are hardworking professionals who practice their craft with honesty and integrity.

Ed, sometimes you and your buddies are too kind and polite for your own good. Absolutely we wouldn't have had this report, or even any occasion for it, had not Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, on a hunch, batted out the memos in Microsoft Word and then started contacting other people and challenging them to reproduce them on a period typewriter. (Bottom line: they couldn't, and though they came close, they didn't use default settings or procedures to do even that well.) And as for other journalists and their integrity, I don't buy that, either. I do buy that you have to avoid a libel action, and that's fine as far as it goes. But truth is an absolute defense to a charge of libel, and I still maintain that every other journalist is just asking to get caught just as Dan Rather did.