Category: CBS

Walter Cronkite had an opportunity to defend Dan Rather on CNN last night in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, and mostly took a pass. While Uncle Walter made some unenthusiastic attempts at excusemaking, but declined the laughable assertion that the Killian memos still hadn’t been established as forgeries, and made his distaste for Dan Rather clear.
Here’s Walter on Memogate:

BLITZER: Well, he’s leaving under a cloud, as you well know, the circumstances surrounding that “60 Minutes” report. It’s unfortunate for him, given his career. But, looking back, there were lots of sloppy mistakes that were made.
CRONKITE: Well, you’re speaking of this particular episode, of course.
And that was most unfortunate. He hung on too long [with the story due] to his faith in his staff. They had provided this material. And he trusted them implicitly in all things and insisted that the information was correct for a whole week, when evidence was beginning to pile up that it wasn’t.

And on the notion that the memos themselves might prove genuine in the future, Cronkite indicates that he isn’t buying it:

BLITZER: He told David Letterman in an interview a couple days ago, he said this: “We were not able to authenticate the documents as thoroughly as I think we should have. Given a little more time, perhaps we could have.” He’s still laying out the possibility that those documents were real, as opposed to forgeries.
CRONKITE: Well, of course, we don’t have any evidence of that. That turned out to be more his hope, as he got deeper into the story, than the actuality would have indicated.

But it wasn’t until Blitzer asked Cronkite about Rather’s replacement that the latter’s distaste for Rather became clear:

BLITZER: Bob Schieffer, as you know, is going to be the interim anchor of “The CBS Evening News,” a good friend of all of ours, an outstanding journalist. Who do you think should emerge as the next anchor, the main anchor of CBS, after Bob Schieffer’s interim period?
CRONKITE: Well, I think it’s going to be hard to find anybody who is going to be as much liked and appreciated and does such a job as Bob Schieffer. I think he’s one of the great television journalists of our time. And he was a good journalist when he came to television from Fort Worth [Texas].
He is, to my mind, the man who, quite frankly — although Dan did a fine job — I would like to have seen him there a long time ago. He would have given the others a real run for their money. …
BLITZER: So, you would have been happier if Bob Schieffer would have replaced Dan Rather a while ago?
CRONKITE: I would have thought so, certainly — if not Bob, someone else.

But the best moment came when Cronkite noted that whoever CBS brought in as permanent anchor would have some mighty big shoes to fill. However, those zapatos wouldn’t be Dan’s:

They’re going to find it’s going to be tough not to follow Dan so much as to follow Schieffer.

And this is what Walter Cronkite says about Dan Rather when he’s retiring, at least from the anchor position. It would be like having the chairman of the board and former CEO get up at a retirement party for his replacement and talk about what a great guy the next replacement will be and how difficult it will be to follow him, while explaning that the man retiring hung on too long. Imagine what Cronkite must have thought about Rather during his long run at CBS.
So long, Dan. You’ll be missed … presumably … by some one.

I recall the movie made by HBO about the late-night television war set off by Johnny Carson’s Retirement, The Late Shift, in which Kathy Bates played Jay Leno’s voracious and self-destructive agent/manager. One criticism of Leno — one he later acknowledged as valid — was that he made no mention of Carson or his support of Leno over the years on Leno’s first broadcast as Carson’s replacement. In the movie, Bates tells the head of NBC that she refuses to let Jay thank or even mention Johnny, telling him, “That’s suck-up. Jay doesn’t do suck-up.”
Well, now we know David Letterman does suck-up, and he sells out pretty easily too. Last night, Letterman hosted Dan Rather on Rather’s farewell tour from the CBS Evening News, and tossed softball after softball to allow Rather to misrepresent the Memogate fiasco that cost four of Rather’s colleagues their jobs. Les Moonves had to be smiling through this — and why not? He bought it, he owns it:

LETTERMAN: So let me go back to two points. They said, one, it was not motivated by political bias?
RATHER: That’s right.
LETTERMAN: So CBS News and yourself and others cleared of that, and that seemed to be a great point of criticism, did it not, that there was political bias here, that…
RATHER: People had their own political motivations and agendas, and some people who didn’t have that, who were asking the question. That’s one reason the panel was appointed. That was one of their conclusions.
LETTERMAN: That charge has been erased by the fact-finding committee?
[RATHER]: That was their conclusion.
LETTERMAN: Did not exist. That evaporated. Secondly, they could not prove the documents were false. They could not prove they were true and accurate, but they also could not prove they were false
RATHER: That’s correct.
LETTERMAN: That’s a push right there.
RATHER: Some people would not regard it, but you’ve summarized it correctly. They had a lot of other findings. Those were among the findings. …
LETTERMAN: If you take a look at the “new york times,” a few years ago and for quite a lengthy period of time, it looked like that newspaper was falling apart. All they had left was the classified pretty much.
( Laughter )
It was one thing after another, guys making up stories and phony headlines and on and on and on, yet still I think it’s regarded as the finest newspaper in the country. So you do have to accept and make changes and continue and that’s what you and the network are doing.

Anyone who considers the New York Times the “finest newspaper in the country” after having a ringside seat for the Jayson Blair embarassment — indeed, using it as an example of its greatness — has either lost his mind or is desperate to get his network off the hook. I wonder exactly how far up Letterman’s back, ventriloquist-style, Moonves was actually able to get his hand, because this is by far one of the worst cases of corporate shilling I’ve yet to see an entertainer do on his own show.
Michelle Malkin, channeling a bit of David Letterman herself (in a good way), wonders why Letterman simply didn’t offer the Top 10 to explain to his audience why CBS blew it? Here are Michelle’s first three of the Top 10 Reasons CBS Has No Credibility:

1. The failure to obtain clear authentication of any of the Killian documents from any document examiner;
2. The false statement in the September 8 Segment that an expert had authenticated the Killian documents when all he had done was authenticate one signature from one document used in the Segment;
3. The failure of 60 Minutes Wednesday management to scrutinize the publiclyavailable, and at times controversial, background of the source of the documents, retired Texas Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett[.]

Read the rest, and also catch Power Line’s take on it here. If you want a history of the CBS Memogate fiasco and an analysis of what Letterman and Rather refer to as a “doorstop”, you can check my archives on the subject in the CBS category.
UPDATE: Edited for a somewhat less graphic description of ventriloquism, ifyouknowhatImean, Vern.

Expect to see this potential explosion of embarrassment settled out of court. Marcel Matley, the documents examiner that CBS dragged in front of them as a human shield in the days following the Memogate report, claims that the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel report defames him and has caused him professional damage:

Marcel Matley, one of four document experts consulted by CBS News while reporting its Sept. 8, 2004, report on Bush, is demanding a slew of corrections in the report, which was issued earlier this month. In an interview with E&P, he referred to the report’s treatment of him as “defamation.” …
In an e-mail to Thornburgh’s office on Jan. 13, obtained by E&P, Matley criticized the report as containing “certain incorrect statements affecting me and which are derogatory and/or damaging to me professionally.” He also asks that the panel issue corrections for each of the errors he contends are in the report and distribute the corrections.
“It is professional defamation,” Matley, a 20-year document expert, told E&P, from his home in San Francisco. “When you are in a court of law, it can make the difference between being considered credible or not.”
He said the report has already hurt his professional reputation, claiming it was mentioned last week during his appearance in a Modesto, Calif., courtroom on a probate case. “Someone brought it up that I was the one who made the mistake in the ’60 Minutes’ case,” he said. “I’ve already had this thrown at me.”

Matley’s rhetoric sounds carefully couched in legal terms, aimed at building a case for a lawsuit against CBS and the Memogate panel. Matley, who appeared on the CBS Evening News to help Dan Rather declare the documents genuine, now says that the report and its less-than-complimentary conclusions absolve him of all confidentiality agreements — a warning shot across Les Moonves’ bow.
Matley has only two specific and objective complaints:
* The report says that Matley is not a typography specialist (see footnotes on page 75). However, it does include Matley’s assertion that courts have accepted his expertise while also describing Matley’s training in the field as a “self-study” program, some private training, and completely lacking in government instruction.
* Matley says he never used the phrase “consistent inconsistencies”. The panel report footnotes its description of Matley’s testimony with this exhibit, but the phrase doesn’t appear in Matley’s handwritten notes.
The rest of Matley’s gripes come from the subjective conclusions of the panel report. He doesn’t like the recommendation that CBS keep a list of expert document examiners, claiming that the recommendation infers that he doesn’t qualify — but the panel never said that Matley should be excluded, although it notes that none of the four retained by Mapes and CBS had “extensive” typographical expertise (page 77). He objects to the characterization of himself as “timid”, although that is just a quote from Gil Schwarz’ testimony to the panel (page 163); likewise, he doesn’t like being called “hostile”, but that word never appears in the report.
Matley, it seems, just doesn’t like the idea that he has become associated with one of the more notorious frauds of letters since the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax by Clifford Irving. Unfortunately for Matley, he played a critical role in obfuscating for CBS when they needed a human shield against the blogosphere, and he shouldn’t act surprised to come away from the battle with a few dings.

Howard Kurtz reports in his Media Notes column that veteran CBS correspondent Tom Fenton pulls few punches in his upcoming book Bad News, including shots across the bow of Dan Rather himself:

The book’s instant headlines will probably come from “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney, who tells Fenton there is “no question” the media are liberal and takes a swipe at Rather: “I think Dan has been — I don’t know why; he may not be as smart as they think — but he has been so blatantly one-sided. . . . He uses little words that are absolute clues, giveaways to his political opinions. Like saying ‘Bush,’ instead of ‘President Bush’ or ‘Mr. Bush.’ . . . A couple of years ago I heard him refer to ‘Bush’s cronies.’ Well, Jesus, ‘cronies’ — oh dear!”

That’s more than the CBS investigative panel ever said about Memogate’s root cause. I find it fascinating that Rooney has more courage to speak out against Dan Rather’s excesses and to identify the bias at the heart of his work than Dick Thornburgh or Louis Boccardi ever did. Rooney still collects a paycheck from CBS, while Thornburgh and Boccardi were supposedly independent. Why couldn’t the lauded “independent” panel find the bias when Andy Rooney pointed it out for the world?
Fenton’s book aims centrally at CBS, but on broader grounds than Memogate or bias. His main complaint is that corporate greed has killed the broadcast news industry, as network expectations of profit got sharper and staff cutbacks became a regular occurence:

Fenton blames “corporate greed” for the decline, saying he was “beaten down by the corporate bean counters” and had “so many of my stories rejected” in the decade before 9/11. CBS’s London bureau, he writes, “doesn’t do much reporting any more. What it does is called packaging,” assembling video and facts gathered by outside organizations.
Likening the practice to Dan Rather’s use of what Fenton calls “phony” memos in the discredited story on President Bush’s National Guard service, Fenton says the networks “take it on trust. Don’t shoot it, don’t report it — just wrap it up and slap the CBS eye on it.”

However, as we saw in the Memogate debacle, CBS screws up its in-house reporting as well. Mary Mapes didn’t just buy the Killian memo story from some stringer; she went out and pursued it, employing several CBS resources to get whatever she could about Bush and the TexANG. She vetted the story and the source as a CBS producer, not an independent — and the story turned out to do more damage than anything Fenton describes.
Fenton may have some good points about how the broadcast news business has fallen apart in the past generation. However, if he pretends that the issue is a lack of budgetary resources, he’s kidding himself and us. He should listen more carefully to Andy Rooney, and that’s advice I don’t give out very often.

CBS chief Les Moonves told reporters today that he’s leaning towards using a rotating series of talking heads, reading news reports from various cities, as a replacement plan for Dan Rather’s position as anchorman. He inadvertently nails the problem that CBS News created while essentially surrendering to its effects:

CBS will probably replace Dan Rather on the evening news with a multi-anchor, perhaps multi-city format that changes the “antiquated” way of reporting the day’s top stories, CBS chief Leslie Moonves said Tuesday.
Moonves, who will ultimately select Rather’s replacement, said he believes many young viewers are turned off by a single “voice of God” anchor in the Internet age. …
“Those days are over when you have that guy sitting behind the desk who everyone believes to the `nth’ degree,” Moonves told reporters. “It’s sort of an antiquated way of news telling and maybe there’s a new way of doing it.”

Thanks to Moonves, Rather, and Andrew Heyward, no one believes the man behind the desk to the “nth degree” or anywhere else. They believe those reports that have substantiation and authenticated evidence, an issue that Moonves’ rotating heads won’t resolve either. Why would having four or five different people reading what other people write give CBS any more credibility than they have now? Granted, having Rather in front of a story automatically damages their viewers’ trust, but the same people making the big decisions still work at CBS News: Rather and Heyward. Until CBS admits its political biases and cleans house, everything they do will be suspect, no matter how many pretty faces they put in front of the camera.
It recalls the efforts of another sad-sack organization, the Chicago Cubs, in the 1960s. Faced with a long losing streak, the brilliant minds at Wrigley Field decided that instead of hiring a manager with some intelligence, they would create the College of Coaches (see 1962). The CoC consisted of eight baseball coaches with equal rank, and all decisions would be made by consensus. The Cubs used this system for two years, and it did have a dramatic impact: they lost 103 games in 1962, finishing below an expansion club, the Houston Colt 45s (later the Astros).
Maybe Moonves wants to transform CBS into the Chicago Cubs of network news broadcasters. Someone needs to tell him they’re already there.
UPDATE: In what has to be the comment of the day, Chuck G notes that I’m targeting the wrong side of the Windy City:

Speaking as a Cubs fan, I’d much prefer the term ‘the Black Sox of network news’.
I mean, the Cubs might be completely unable to hit the damn ball, but at least they’re honestly *trying* to. CBS, on the other hand, is deliberately fixing games.

Chuck, you do make an excellent point …
UPDATE II: Houston Colt 45s; I’ve updated it above.

CQ reader Ken Stepanek sent a link to a message board for the Yahoo group Texas Democrats with a message purportedly from Bill Burkett’s wife Nicki. The message alerted Texas Democrats to the Cory Pein article from the Columbia Journalism Review that turned out to be incorrect on most of the points the panel’s report addressed. According to this January 3rd message, the Burketts believed they had frightened the CBS panel into a change of course:

This past week, we may have scared the Devil out of senior folks at CBS and throughout the journalistic World. We are now negotiating with the VIACOM panel for an in-depth interview to explore the facts and documentation of the story; the roles of CBS, ABC, the Associated Press, New York TImes, USA Today and numerous others who actively sought Bill out as a source on the story and their backlash after the story went elsewhere. We have already received open-ended offers from NBC, publishers and lately a Movie producer.
This is background information only. But please understand that Bill hasremained quiet while VIACOM conducted it’s investigation.

So what contact did the Burketts and their lawyers have with the independent Thornburgh-Boccardi panel? What kind of threats were made against CBS and Viacom? If Nicki Burkett made these claims a week prior to the report’s release, perhaps this indicates that the Burketts had prior access to it. It at least calls into question the panel’s extraordinary reluctance to draw any definitive conclusions on the authenticity of the documents when even their expert told them conclusively they came from a modern computer. And are the other media outlets taking it easy on the CBS report in order to use Burkett as a source for other stories?
This report smells more every day. CBS and Viacom owe us more answers.

In a sure sign that the Thornburgh-Boccardi report and Les Moonves’ following announcement has backfired, a groundswell of criticism continues to grow against CBS News and Moonves for its half-hearted corrective actions and its refusal to admit to the bias at the heart of the scandal. Yesterday, Van Gordon Sauter slammed CBS for its “unremitting liberal orientation” that makes its news shows “unwatchable.” Today, two new front-line essays reject the whitewash. Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, calls out CBS for its inaction:

Rather absented himself from the newscast Monday evening, the day the independent investigators’ report and Moonves’ response were made public. Then on Tuesday he was back in his usual role, after issuing a statement to CBS News colleagues that concluded: “I have seen us overcome adversity before. I am convinced we can do it again.”
No apology. No acknowledgement that the buck stopped with him.
Rather has had many high points in a distinguished career since he succeeded Walter Cronkite on March 9, 1981. But this low point likely will haunt him forever, unless …
Unless he quits the anchor’s chair now, gives up any thought of continuing on 60 Minutes and helps his former co-workers who took the fall for his fumbling the ball find new jobs.

Interestingly and somewhat ironically, the paid advertisement for Neuharth’s screed promotes NBC’s Nightly News with new anchorman Brian Williams. Williams strikes a skeptical look for the camera, a hilarious counterpoint to Neuharth’s scolding. He gazes out from the page as if thinking, “That’s all you got?”
USA Today played its part in reporting the Killian memos, too. USA Today got all six Burkett-supplied documents and posted them on their website along with their interview of Bill Burkett on September 21st. This interview was the first time that audiences heard the tortured explanation of the chain of custody of the memos, the one involving “Lucy Ramirez,” a livestock show, and burned originals. USA Today’s Burkett interview demolished the notion that anyone not predisposed by bias against George Bush could have found Burkett an “unimpeachable” source:

Burkett’s emotions varied widely in the interviews. One session ended when Burkett suffered a violent seizure and collapsed in his chair. …
Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.
“I didn’t even ask any questions,” Burkett said. “Should I have? Yes. Maybe I was duped. I never really even considered that.” …
After he received the documents in Houston, Burkett said, he drove home, stopping on the way at a Kinko’s shop in Waco to copy the six memos. In the parking lot outside, he said, he burned the ones he had been given and the envelope they were in. Ramirez was worried about leaving forensic evidence on them that might lead back to her, Burkett said, acknowledging that the story sounded fantastic. “This is going to sound like some damn sci-fi movie,” he said.

Now we know, of course, that Burkett even lied while supposedly coming clean to USA Today. Far from the notion of being duped never crossing his mind, we know from the CBS report that Burkett repeatedly insisted that CBS independently authenticate the documents (page 78, among others). In fact, that insistence should have raised immediate red flags for CBS producer Mary Mapes about the validity of the memos. Burkett couldn’t tell the truth if he was bleeding to death, apparently.
Neuharth isn’t the only one taking CBS to the woodshed today. Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post also considers their response completely unaccpetable and says so in much stronger terms than Neuharth:

First comes the crime: Dan Rather’s late hit on President Bush’s Air National Guard service, featuring what were almost immediately revealed to be forged documents.
Then comes the coverup: 12 days of CBS stonewalling, with Dan Rather using his evening news platform to (a) call his critics “partisan political operatives,” (b) claim falsely that the documents were authenticated by experts, and (c) claim that he had “solid sources,” which turned out to be a rabid anti-Bush partisan with a history of, shall we say, prolific storytelling.
Now comes the twist: The independent investigation — clueless, uncomprehending and in its own innocent way disgraceful — pretends that this fiasco was in no way politically motivated.

If Les Moonves hoped to bury this scandal by using a supposedly independent panel, he finds himself very much in error. The nation’s biggest media outlets have blasted the cowardice of the final report in its refusal to reach any conclusions, calling into question what it saw as its role in the first place. Moonves has compounded the mistake by firing four mid-level employees instead of the two people in charge at CBS News who not only approved the debacle for publication, but also by commission (Rather) and omission (Heyward) allowed the news division to stonewall and attack its critics for partisanship in a classic case of corporate projection.
The four fired employees reportedly will fire wrongful-termination lawsuits against Viacom and CBS, a development we should all support. Not that the four didn’t deserve to get fired, or even that their terminations were unfair in light of the escapes of Heyward and Rather; they all clearly deserved termination for incompetence at the least, and Mapes for a breathtaking record of lies and misleading statements connected to the story which should destroy her credibility for all time. No, the depositions and testimony of the lawsuit will finally force CBS and its executives — including Dan Rather — to come completely clean about the collapse of the once-dominant broadcast news outlet, and the mainstream media in general.
Now that’s a report I’d like to read.
UPDATE: Tapscott’s Copy Desk wants to know why CBS is so disinterested in the origin of the forgeries. Good question.

I created a new category for the CBS Memogate scandal and re-categorized by posts on the subject in order to allow readers to easily read through CQ archives. Most of the commentary comes from the first couple of weeks after the September 8 airdate (the rest over this week), and has details which I’d forgotten. I hope you find it helpful.
UPDATE: Charles at LGF and Instapundit note that CBS and the Thornburgh-Boccardi site at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP have modified the CBS report file to keep bloggers from copying and pasting from the report. I just tested it myself and found the same thing. All I know is that I copied the first edition, which is how I was able to excerpt so much of it and use it in my blog posts. Now you can too.

A familiar voice weighs in on the bias that Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi couldn’t find at CBS News. Van Gordon Sauter, the onetime chief of the Tiffany Network’s news division, writes in today’s Los Angeles Times that an “unremitting liberal orientation” at the Unblinking Eye has made its news programs unwatchable:

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.
Personally, I have a great affection for CBS News, even though I was unceremoniously shown to the door there nearly 20 years ago in a tumultuous change of corporate management.
But I stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me. I still check in, but less and less frequently. I increasingly drift to NBC News and Fox and MSNBC.

Sauter advises CBS and his successor, Les Moonves, to find its way back to the political center, although he doesn’t offer a roadmap for that trip. He compliments Moonves as a man who can and will turn CBS from its leftist biases, even though he describes Moonves as a liberal himself; he thinks Moonves has enough self-awareness to do the job.
Perhaps. However, Moonves did not start auspiciously this week, struggling mightily to maintain his grasp on the fiction that political bias played no role in the Memogate fiasco. He also hung onto Dan Rather, who not only plays a large part in the political orientation of the division, but repeatedly lied during and after the Killian memo story developed. Sauter doesn’t address this, nor does he attempt to explain how retaining Andrew Heyward’s services will create any opportunity for a fresh look at the newsroom and its lack of philosophical diversity.
Still, while Sauter may have an overdeveloped sense of optimism, at least he recognizes the problem. In that, he has surpassed Moonves, Thornburgh, and Boccardi. Maybe Viacom (the CBS parent) should think about rehiring him and dumping Moonves.

In a column appropriately titled “It’s Worse Than You Thought,” Jonathan Last at the Weekly Standard takes a close look at Appendix 4 of the CBS panel report. The Thornburgh-Boccardi investigation declined to make any firm conclusion on the authenticity of the Killian memos at the heart of the scandal, allowing Mary Mapes and Dan Rather enough cover to claim that their story still had not been repudiated. As Last points out, however, their own expert definitively concluded otherwise:

On September 12, 2004, Newcomer, one of the fathers of modern electronic typesetting, published a 7,000 word essay about the fraudulent documents used by CBS. Newcomer’s conclusion was simple and unequivocal. “These documents,” he said after much explanation, “are modern forgeries.” So why did the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel turn their back on Newcomer and the rest of the body of expert opinion? What caused them to suspect that the documents might indeed be authentic?
APPENDIX 4 of the CBS Report details the panel’s lone inquiry into the technical aspects of the questionable memos using the services of Peter Tytell. The report gives nearly a full page of Tytell’s impressive qualifications, the most charming of which is that he was once referred to as a “famous typewriter detective” by CBS’s own Andy Rooney. …
Now, after careful examination, Tytell has come to three conclusions:
(1) The previously-released Texas Air National Guard documents had been created on an “Olympia manual typewriter.”
(2) The four disputed Killian memos “were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter.”
(3) “The Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle.”

How did the panel fail to miss this when reaching its conclusions? After all, Tytell’s analysis appears in their own report. Last finds the explanation in a footnote buried in the report:

Although his reasoning seems credible and persuasive, the Panel does not know for certain whether Tytell has accounted for all alternative typestyles that might have been available on typewriters during that era.

That, my friends, is one of the dumbest cop-outs I have ever read. They hired Tytell for his expertise in document authentication, and Tytell unequivocally stated that the memos were created by a modern computer. If they have reason to doubt that, why not do what they expected of CBS and get a second opinion? This demonstrates a complete lack of courage and colors all of their conclusions as a result.