A little sampling of what's being said this week by the punditry on the CBS Thornburgh-Boccardi report. First, former CBS exec Van Gordon Sauter just diagnoses the ailment:
What's the big problem at CBS News?Well, for one thing, it has no credibility. And no audience, no morale, no long-term emblematic anchorperson and no cohesive management structure. Outside of those annoyances, it shouldn't be that hard to fix.
John Podhoretz says the Thornburgh-Boccardi finding that the culprit was not bias, but simply "haste"...
...is a preposterous line of argument. The problem with the story had nothing to do with the purity or lack thereof of the reporting process--and anyway there is no such thing as a reporting process. If the documents had not been exposed as fabrications, Mary Mapes and CBS News would still have made every mistake for which they are tasked in the report--and yet they would have been garlanded, hailed, rewarded with journalism prizes. The haste for which they are now being attacked would instead have been considered wondrously aggressive competitiveness. And they might have taken home the ultimate prize--the knowledge that their reporting had brought down a presidency......The problem with the story wasn't that it was rushed to air. The problem with the story wasn't that it violated journalistic protocols. The problem was that the story was a lie based on a fraud, and a conveniently timed lie at that--coming as it did only eight weeks before the nation was to go to the polls. And the lie was laid out before the world for all to see in a matter of hours.
Krauthammer rips the willfull blindness of the Thornburgh report and closes here with the line of the week:
The independent investigation -- clueless, uncomprehending and in its own innocent way disgraceful -- pretends that this fiasco was in no way politically motivated.The investigation does note that the show's producer called Joe Lockhart of the Kerry campaign to alert him to the story and to urge him to contact the purveyor of the incriminating documents. It concludes that this constitutes an "appearance of political bias." What would producer Mary Mapes have had to do to go beyond appearance? Show up at the Kerry headquarters?
CBS had been pursuing the story for five years. Five years! The Manhattan Project took three.
Finally, read Ron Rosenbaum's empassioned plea for Dan to resign and try to regain some dignity:
The way it looks now, you’ll be remembered as the craven boss who let all his underlings get fired because they went the extra mile to please you. You’ll be remembered as the Nixonian character who hid behind a screen of "My underlings made mistakes, not me; I wasn’t in on it."Posted by dan at January 20, 2005 11:13 PM | TrackBackWhile everyone in the world knows they rushed the "story," skipped steps, rushed the verification process for the greater glory of you, Dan. What if the bloggers hadn’t blown the whistle, and you and your crew never learned how pathetically you were gamed by your "sources" ("Lucy Ramirez," come on down!)—and you succeeded in putting one over on the public? Who would be getting the credit? Mary Mapes? No it would be Dan (the President Slayer) Rather.
You’d be happy to claim the credit, but look at you now—hiding under the covers of the "outside report," clinging to your official position while your credibility as a journalist and as a stand-up guy is shredded.