Gee, Ya Think?

Good editorial in the Tue-Sep-21 New York Post Black Rock Stonewall makes some good observations about the "apology"

Dan Rather regrets.

• Not that he slandered the president of the United States on the basis of fraudulent documents.
• Not that he did his best to undermine the moral authority of America's commander in chief in time of war.
• Not that he implied ­ publicly and darkly ­that he himself was the victim of "powerful and well-financed...partisan ideological forces."

No, none of that.

Dan Rather and CBS News regret, basically, that they got caught.

Yesterday, CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Evening News anchor Dan Rather separately backed away from those spectacularly forged "documents" about George W. Bush's Air National Guard service thusly:

• "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret," said Heyward.
• "We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry," added Rather. "It was an error that was made, however, in good faith."

They still won't say the memos are forgeries ­ only that they "no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow them to continue vouching for them journalistically."

Whatever that means.

Does Rather still contend that his story ­that Bush got into the Guard through political influence and then failed to meet his obligations ­ is true, even if the documents are not? He isn't saying.

So what led the once-upon-a-time Tiffany Network to lose faith in the documents?

The fact that the man who slipped them to "60 Minutes" ­ embittered ex-Guardsman and obsessive Bush foe Bill Burkett ­ "misled [us] on the key question" of how he obtained them.

According to CBS, Burkett claimed to have obtained the memos from another ex-Guardsman. Now he admits he lied, in order to protect the identity of the "real" source, whom the network "has been unable to verify."

Rather admitted last night that CBS approached Burkett, instead of the other way around, and described him as someone who was "well-known" for having been trying for years "to discredit President Bush." Yet Rather last week insisted the documents came from "an unimpeachable source."

Sounds mighty impeachable to us.

Yet for more than a week, even as the documents were being discredited by major national news organizations, Rather and Heyward refused to acknowledge the obvious.

By the weekend, they were reduced to claiming that they didn't bother investigating the documents authenticity because the White House didn't immediately brand them as forgeries.

Ed Murrow would have been so proud.

Even now, we don't think Dan Rather truly gets it.

An error made "in good faith"?

No way. Indeed, Rather's animus toward the Bush family has been an embarrassment to the network ­ and to himself, if he is capable of embarrassment ­ for years.

To no avail.

Obviously eagerness overcame judgment: the "documents" were simply too tempting for Rather to pass up.

CBS yesterday pledged to undertake "an independent review" of this entire debacle. (O.J. is still searching for the real killers, too.)

CBS is not the first news organization to make a big mistake ­ heaven knows. But the test of credibility in such cases is how you behave after making a mistake.

First Rather and the network stonewalled.

Now they're trying the modified, limited hangout.

But Rather, in particular, ought to know where that course will take him. He ought to know that the coverup is always worse than the crime.

CBS needs to answer this question: What did the anchorman know, and when did he know it?

Rather knows that drill.

USA today posted a timeline Sep-21-204 in Scoops and skepticism: How the story unfolded that detailed the fact that Burkett was talking to them, providing them with the same documents, at the same time that he was talking to CBS news. I think the USA reporting, and potential to independently rip the covers off the sourcing, was what drove CBS to abandon the stonewall.