[A-List] US news media: buckling under Bush

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

CBS apologises for 'mistaken' story of Bush's military service

Suzanne Goldenberg in New York
Tuesday September 21, 2004
The Guardian

CBS television issued a humbling apology yesterday for a report on an
investigative programme, saying that its story claiming that George Bush had
been given special treatment during his stint in the Texas air national
guard was deeply flawed and should not have gone on air.

It abruptly changed course after days of expressing confidence in the report
on 60 Minutes, which relied heavily on four memos purportedly written by a
now dead commander in the guard to show that Mr Bush received special
treatment during his military service.

"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are
authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify
using them in the report," a statement by the president of CBS News, Andrew
Heyward, said.

"We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."

Dan Rather, the anchorman who presented the story and defended it for nearly
two weeks, issued a separate apology.

"We made a mistake in judgment and for that I am sorry," he said.

The statement from Rather, an American television idol for 20 years, went on
to make the embarrassing admission that the programme's producers had been
duped by a disgrunted former member of the Texas national guard, who had
provided the documents.

The network did not say the documents were forgeries, but after further
investigation of the story at the weekend Rather concluded: "I find we have
been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came
into possession of these papers.

"That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public
and in the press, leads me to a point where - if I knew then what I know
now - I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I
certainly would not have used the documents in question."

Since the programme was shown on September 8, Rather has become a lightning
rod for Republican and rightwing outrage, and the subject of increasingly
uncomfortable scrutiny by media commentators.

A number of leading Republicans accused him of bias.

Yesterday he said the reporting for the programme had been done in good
faith.

The programme was based primarily on four memos from the early 1970s,
allegedly from the private files of Mr Bush's squadron commander, Lieutenant
Colonel Jerry Killian.

In one of the most damaging of the purported memos, the late Col Killian
complained that Mr Bush disobeyed a direct order to submit to a medical
exam.

The story also included a claim by a former Texas lieutenant governor, Ben
Barnes, that he had pulled strings to get Mr Bush into the guard, and so
spare him from being sent to Vietnam.

Within minutes of the broadcast doubts about the documents began circulating
on the internet, claiming that the memos were fake.

Document experts said that the print on the memos did not correspond to that
of the typewriters in use at the time but did seem suspiciously close to
Windows computer programmes.

CBS stood by its story, even though two document specialists raised doubts
about the authenticity of the memos before the story went on air.

Although Rather conceded in a report last week that the documents may appear
fake, he insisted that Col Killian's frustration with Mr Bush was all too
real, and he brought on the late commander's former secretary to
substantiate the assertion.

At the weekend President Bush weighed in for the first time, telling a
newspaper in New Hampshire: "There are a lot of questions about the
documents, and they need to be answered."

Meanwhile, Rather and other CBS executives began to have doubts about the
man who has emerged as a possible conduit for the documents, a former
national guard officer called Bill Burkett.

In interviews since the scandal erupted Mr Burkett has made repeated
accusations of a cover-up in Mr Bush's service records.

He has also said he was spurned in his efforts to convince the Democrat
contender John Kerry's advisers to use material damaging to Mr Bush.

In its statement yesterday CBS admitted that Mr Burkett was the source of
the discredited documents, and that he had told the network he had misled
the producer working on the story to protect his own sources.

"Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former
guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source, whose connection
to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this
point," its statement said.