Category: CBS

Howard Kurtz continues his reporting on the CBS scandal and Thornburgh-Boccardi aftermath this morning, to his credit; most of his industry colleagues have busied themselves with other work and pretending that the controversy has passed. In today’s lengthy look at the post-report reaction, Kurtz addresses the inconclusiveness of the report on the question of bias:

If there is one line in the 224-page report on CBS News that has set critics aflame, it is that there is no “basis” for concluding that Dan Rather and his colleagues had a “political bias” in pursuing their badly botched story about President Bush’s National Guard service.
What, they say? No evidence?
“In any fair-minded assessment of how CBS performed and why they so badly butchered their own standards, that has to be part of the explanation,” said former New York Times reporter Steve Roberts, now a professor at George Washington University. “It’s not just that they wanted to be first, they wanted to be first with a story that was critical of the president.”
The investigators hired by CBS “lay out a bunch of evidence of political bias, and very little exculpatory evidence, and then throw their hands in the air,” said Weekly Standard writer Jonathan Last. “Rather is sitting here maintaining, despite everything, that the memos don’t actually matter, that the story is right.”

Kurtz also has panel member Louis Boccardi’s explanation, which relies heavily on a legalistic approach to an analytical job:

Louis Boccardi, the former Associated Press chief executive who headed the panel with former attorney general Dick Thornburgh, said they “didn’t feel we could say, ‘We accuse you, Mary Mapes, of having a political bias and we can prove it.’ Instead we said, ‘Look, here are the things these folks did, that the program did.’ ” This, Boccardi acknowledged, “won’t satisfy anybody who thinks anything short of outright condemnation, a finding of political bias, was an act of cowardice . . . that we didn’t have the nerve, courage, wisdom, insight to say it.” But, he added, “bias is a hard thing to prove.”

I give Howard Kurtz high marks for continuing to pursue the story in depth while other outlets run away from the stink. However, Kurtz misses an opportunity to make clear what both Last and Roberts assert in their quotes. Kurtz implies that the only people claiming that the report whitewashed the political bias of Mapes, Rather, and CBS are Rather’s critics, when a wide swath of independent analysts like Roberts also conclude that from the full report. Nor does Kurtz report more in-depth from that report to give his readers a clearer understanding of the bias issue (except for one brief Mapes quote), or even note Jonathan Last’s work in the Weekly Standard in that regard.
In fact, while Kurtz uses all the same careful non-judgmental words that the CBS panel employed, he manages to bury his lead at the bottom of his article. Linda Mason, the new senior VP in charge of Standards — a position created by Les Moonves on the panel’s recommendation — tells Kurtz that Dan Rather’s paranoia appears to govern CBS News division policy:

“We didn’t come clean soon enough,” Linda Mason said yesterday. But, she added, “Dan does think he’s constantly attacked. If we backed off every story that was criticized, we wouldn’t be doing any stories.”

First, anyone who publishes receives criticism, as my own comments section amply demonstrates. I don’t circle the wagons and stonewall fact-checkers when that happens, which is exactly what Rather did. Nor do I consider it an attack, at least not until it gets personal. I also don’t get paid to publish, and Rather makes millions, which should be enough for him to grow a thick skin and a hefty pair. If Rather feels he’s under constant attack and therefore cannot acknowledge any criticism whatsoever, and if CBS is this comfortable enabling that response, it shows that the Memogate fiasco will happen again and again regardless of who CBS puts in charge of Standards or the division.
Many bloggers have conjectured on the parallels between Rather and Richard Nixon over the past four months. Now we see that even CBS acknowledges Rather’s paranoia and its constricting effect on truth at Black Rock.

Twenty-four hours after the other shoe dropped at CBS and their long-awaited independent report was released, the mainstream media and their cousins in the blogosphere have analyzed and debated its meaning. Some bloggers see some small victories in the otherwise tepid and timid conclusions reached by the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel. Others, especially Hugh Hewitt and Jonathan Last, understandably call the entire exercise a whitewash for failing to reach the obvious conclusion that producer Mary Mapes and CBS allowed Memogate to occur because of their deep political biases. Some, oddly, have hardly bothered to comment at all.
The mainstream media has analyzed and opined on the report all morning. Every major news outlet has its own take on the situation, although as Hugh notes, they mostly want to declare the war over and look towards a new era of accountability with a jaundiced eye. Given their proximity to the same pressures and biases evident at CBS, this reaction is understandable, if self-destructive; a refusal to see the truth almost guarantees that another major news outlet will suffer the same debacle.
But what’s missing from all the mainstream media analyses, as CQ reader John Holas notes, is any consideration at all of the role that the blogosphere played in bringing accountability to CBS. The panel report itself only mentions the word “blog” 12 times in the entire 234-page report, and only in passing except for the Aftermath section, which acknowledges that the criticism began with Power Line and Little Green Footballs. After that, no mention is made of the critical role that the entire blogosphere played in keeping the story hot and breaking down the stonewalling that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes used to attempt escaping their accountability.
The mainstream media today offers the same myopic analysis for CBS’ woes. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and Dana Milbank never mention the word “blog in their analysis. Kurtz doesn’t mention blogs once in his news story on the CBS report, either, although he does quote a few bloggers in his Media Notes column today. Neither does the New York Times’ Bill Carter in the story which I linked earlier, nor does USA Today’s coverage of the story. Bloggers get shut out at the Boston Globe, too. The Los Angeles Times article on the CBS report actually manages to mention blogs — once, in the penultimate paragraph:

Much of the early criticism of the broadcast on Bush came from Web loggers, or “bloggers,” and their critiques spread rapidly through the media.

Perhaps you’d assume the Internet news sources would do better — but you’d be mistaken. CNN also comes up with nothing on bloggers, and in fact their report no longer has a link on CNN’s front page. MS-NBC also comes a cropper on bloggers, even though it pays a few bloggers for commentary and hosts its own blog site.
Why all the reluctance? How exactly does the mainstream media fail to report this singular and revolutionary event, where a mainstream news outlet was forced into accountability by a semi-organized movement of its own customers? Without the blogosphere, there would have been no story. The other news agencies hardly poked their nose into the story until Power Line, LGF, InDC Journal, and a number of other bloggers and Internet users had created a firestorm of outrage over the obvious forgeries of the Killian memos. Bloggers, being failed by the media organizations they patronize, hired their own experts to review the CBS memos, notably Bill Ardolino at InDC Journal.
In other words, the blogosphere did the MSM’s job for it — and ate their lunch while doing so. Only after professional-quality reporting burst forth from hundreds of citizen journalists did any of the MSM grab onto the story. Even then, the quality of their reporting was almost uniformly poor, castigating the amateur sleuths in the blogosphere as partisan and unreliable, while they mostly declined to engage CBS on the merits of the argument. (ABC and the New York Post were two notable exceptions.) In their central mission to the American populace — uncovering and reporting the truth — the mainstream media failed utterly, and for the same reasons as CBS allowed Memogate to air: political bias.
That’s the other part of the whitewash we see in today’s coverage of the CBS report. The mainstream media would have us believe now that the corruption of CBS and 60 Minutes Wednesday was self-evident and needed no impetus for discovery. They do not want to come to terms with an activist and energized readership, one that refuses to act like sheep any more. These media leaders cannot face their own biases and their desperate grip on the spigot of information, and so they attempt to simply ignore the critical role that the blogosphere played in bringing this debacle to light.
When we talk about whitewashes, let’s remember that history can also be rewritten to hand defeats to the victors and acquittals to the guilty. We can see this process happening before our eyes in the media right now — and the blogosphere had better react to it.

Jonathan Last writes an excellent (and blessedly brief, if you’ve been reading my posts) on the CBS report. I highly recommend that everyone read “Whitewash”, even though it isn’t exactly complimentary to my initial analysis. I still think that the CBS report does a lot more damage than Last and Hugh Hewitt think, but they are absolutely correct that the result whitewashes the political-bias angle at CBS.
Keep scrolling down here at CQ for much more detailed analysis on that score.
NOTE: For those of you who think we’re still taking this too easily, I did do a rather extensive analysis of the bias evident in the report. It had to wait until I could get home from work and read the panel report in detail. It’s very long (4200 words), but I think it captures the pre-publication decision points that clearly demonstrate a political bias from Mapes and from CBS.

Howard Kurtz and Dana Milbank collaborate on an analysis of the CBS debacle for the Washington Post, determining that the damage done by Mapes & Co. goes far beyond the gates of Black Rock. They surmise, correctly, that the overall credibility of American mainstream media has taken a body blow, and that their audiences may never give them the authority they once had. Unfortunately, and for Milbank unsurprisingly, the two couch that analysis within a deeply partisan slant:

President Bush was reelected, and Dan Rather wasn’t.
That, in a nutshell, is the outcome of a bitter four-month struggle between the White House, which insisted there was no basis for the “60 Minutes” report casting doubt on the president’s National Guard service, and a major network whose controversial anchor chose to give up his job before the release of the outside panel’s report that sharply criticized him yesterday.
Many Republicans couldn’t resist crowing that the report, commissioned by CBS, repudiated the network’s reporting on so many levels, given the longtime conservative animosity toward Rather as a symbol of liberal bias. And although the panel’s report found no political bias by anyone at CBS, it was clearly a setback for the mainstream media against an administration that has often stiff-armed or ignored journalists, whom Bush calls an unreliable “filter” between him and the public.

Instead of looking for opinions supporting this analysis coming from more objective outsiders (such as done by Bill Carter at the NYT), Kurtz and Milbank only question political players, reducing the piece to a typical he said/she said tennis match. Apparently, Kurtz and Milbank reported on the subject but learned nothing from it. Even so, their analysis comes closer to the heart of the CBS scandal — political bias — than the Thornburgh-Boccardi report dared:

“I think it is part of a series of things that have gone on in the broader mainstream media that led to a decline in confidence among the public,” [RNC chair Ed] Gillespie said in an interview, citing fabrication scandals at the New York Times and USA Today. As for Bush’s Vietnam-era record, he added, “The public has made their judgment: They know the president served and was honorably discharged.”
The impact of the CBS scandal was magnified both by Bush, who often disparages the media, and by Rather, who pugnaciously defended himself as the victim of conservative attacks. Rather drew the battle lines clearly in defending the story, saying the critics included “partisan political operatives,” and told the outside panel he still thinks the accusations of Bush receiving favorable treatment are true, whether or not the documents are real.

The only quote from a reasonably disinterested third party comes from Harvard’s Alex Jones, also quoted for better effect in Carter’s NYT piece this morning. He notes that network-news viewership has declined twenty points over the past 16 years, and that the CBS report will damage that further:

“If you’re a Bush person,” Alex S. Jones, who runs Harvard’s Shorenstein media center, said of yesterday’s report, “it confirms in your mind that the press is out to get Bush. If you’re a non-Bush person, you’ll be dismayed that George Bush will appear to be vindicated and validated by CBS’s humiliation.”

In other words, neither side will trust CBS for its news sourcing any longer. The networks in general will also take a hit as viewers will migrate towards either the 24-hour news channels — with which CBS has no affiliation — or the Internet, where CBS’ presence is miniscule at best. Only NBC has managed a strong Internet presence, but its cable news channels are frankly abysmal. All of the broadcast networks will suffer for CBS’ sins, especially since they committed their own during this campaign; ABC’s Halperin memo directing the news staff to go easy on Kerry at tear after Bush, and NBC’s re-edit of Kerry’s interview to remove his admission that he had not released all of his military records.
Kurtz and Milbank do give equal time to Democrats, which they could probably do without. They have Joe Lockhart, one of the most blatantly partisan political figures in circulation, complaining about GOP partisanship while desperately flogging the TexANG story:

Democrats chafed at the notion that CBS’s failings would put to rest any question about Bush’s wartime service. “I understand why the right will whip this up as a vindication, but they’re just being partisan,” said Joe Lockhart, a former spokesman for President Bill Clinton and for Kerry’s presidential campaign.
Lockhart said “there was just as much sloppiness, just as much of a rush to judgment and just as many mistakes” during Clinton’s impeachment. “I don’t think we’re certain the president fully fulfilled his National Guard service,” he added.

They also include DNC spokesman Jose Cabrera valiantly trying to change the subject to Armstrong Williams, but the effort merely displays the desperation felt by the Democrats at seeing their mouthpieces slowly crumble into ineffectiveness. The mainstream media has long covered the Democrats’ flank, and now they have been unmasked, even if the CBS panel couldn’t bring itself to explicitly say so in this case.

While the New York Times writes its moderate critique of CBS News’ response to the Thornburgh-Boccardi report, another New York paper presents a devastating look at the network’s decision to keep and protect the two people who should have taken responsibility for allowing the Killian memo segment to air. David Blum writes in the New York Sun that both men should have resigned in the wake of the scandal, and specifically their responses to it:

[W]e are supposed to accept Mr. Moonves’s contention, in his statement that accompanied the report’s release yesterday, that Mr. Heyward deserves to keep his job because “he issued direct instructions to investigate the sourcing of the story” and “pressed for his staff to come up with new and substantive information.” But the report itself makes clear that Mr. Heyward (who personally screened the piece in advance of air) wrote his first significant questioning e-mail after watching a “Good Morning America” discussion between George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson almost 36 hours after the story aired. Is that supposed to be leadership?

As I have noted earlier, Heyward appears to carry little weight within his own news division. His early warnings to substantiate “evey syllable” of the Killian memos not only went unheeded, but completely ignored by his staff and producer Mary Mapes. Once the story broke, Heyward dithered in the face of its immediate and substantial criticism regarding the authenticity of the memos that formed the core of the story. He allowed the same team that produced the report to dictate the networks’ response.
Small wonder that Heyward gets little attention to his directives. A leader, as Blum infers, does not stand around and let events consume him in a crisis. Heyward did just that. Moonves notes that Heyward “asked the right questions,” but Heyward wasn’t demanding the answers. Instead, he allowed Dan Rather and Mary Mapes to hijack the CBS News division in a destrutive wagon-circling exercise, blaming the criticism of their reporting on political partisanship.
Speaking of Rather, who CBS titled as their “managing editor”, it turns out that Rather was nothing more than an empty suit, a mouthpiece in front of the camera. He did nothing to develop this story, and one suspects that this is the rule instead of the exception. However, Blum nails Rather not for the story itself, but his participation in the aftermath:

[H]ow does Mr. Rather, the story’s on-air reporter – who, the commission reports, fought pressure to deliver the half-hearted on-air apology he eventually gave for the story on September 20 – avoid culpability for his egregious lack of involvement in the story he presented? According to the commission, Mr. Rather never even saw the story before it aired.

According to the report, Rather now renounces that half-hearted apology. He says he did it only to be a “team player” after CBS got shellacked by the media for the report. Amazingly, he still believes that the Killian memos are genuine, and he supports Mary Mapes’ contention that the Thornburgh-Boccardi report actually bolsters that position. Rather will engage in endless spin instead of acknowledging his and CBS’ egregious error — a mindset that has proven dangerous in the newsroom, and one that should get him fired immediately, if for no other reason.
Another reason still exists, however. Rather, as Managing Editor, got in front of a camera after the storm of criticsm broke to do damage control. He told the nation that the documents were genuine, that they had been authenticated by experts, and that they originated from “unimpeachable” sources. Rather had no personal knowledge of any of these assertions, and yet he told his audience that he personally vouched for the truth of these statements. The most charitable explanation possible was that Rather put so much stock in Mapes that he believed her own assertions. It still doesn’t change the fact that Rather lied, and Rather misrepresented his own involvement in ensuring the accuracy of the report.
For that reason alone, Rather should have gotten the axe.
The CBS response to the tepid Thornburgh-Boccardi report has proven disappointing. They fired two medium-level managers, one executive, and Mary Mapes, but addressed nothing to the two people who crafted the lies that CBS told in the aftermath of the scandal. Until they do, and until they address the rot that exists within their news division, CBS will never recover their credibility.

The fallout from the Thornburgh-Boccardi report continues today with a moderately critical analysis from the New York Times’ Bill Carter. Carter notes that the once-glorious CBS News division now suffers from a badly-damaged morale, with people questioning why division president Andrew Heyward avoided any disciplinary action whatsoever. Carter notes that staff discontent has caused other executives to make unplanned departures and wonders what the future has in store for Heyward:

What exactly that will mean is still uncertain, though several staff members reported the morale in the department to be devastatingly low. “We are all sad and miserable,” said one CBS production staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect against criticism from superiors at the network.
One lingering question is how much accountability should be laid at the feet of Andrew Heyward, the president of the division. In several of the prominent journalism scandals that have surfaced recently – at USA Today and The New York Times – the top executives were eventually forced out.
The dissatisfaction of the news staffs played a role in both those developments.
Several CBS News staff members continued to question Mr. Heyward’s level of responsibility yesterday. One said the feelings of the staff toward him were mixed, with some wondering how everyone under him could be blamed and not him, and others hoping he would survive because the news division could not take any more losses. Mr. Heyward declined to comment.

According to Carter, staffers wonder at their ability to break news in the future with the Mapes debacle hanging over their heads. CBS pulled a second story critical of Bush and the Iraq decision shortly after the scandal broke, and to this date has not aired it. CBS has not commented on its reasoning, but clearly its management won’t take the same risks that allowed Mapes’ political hackery to air in the middle of a presidential election.
Nor does everyone buy the Thornburgh-Boccardi meme that political bias had no part in the story, at least on the part of Mapes. Alex Jones, a media expert at Harvard University, found the argument “foolish” and counterproductive (my analyis on bias can be found here):

Ms. Mapes, who lives in Texas, was also known inside CBS for her long-time aggressive coverage of President Bush, going back to his days as governor. Though Mr. Moonves and other CBS executives yesterday pointed to the panel’s exoneration of the network on charges of political bias against the president, not everyone agreed that it played no role at all.
“It sounds like you had a star reporter here who fell in love with a story,” Mr. Jones said. “Her previous work had given her a reputation sufficient to bowl over everyone else. It seems like it was a combination of competitive pressure, hubris and a little politics. I think it’s foolish to separate this entirely from politics, no matter what the report says. All in all that’s a witches’ brew.”

In a strange but compelling explanation, Carter relates a comment from a CBS staffer that they feared Mapes more than Heyward. That certainly would explain the lack of attention that Heyward received when he reportedly told 60 Minutes Wednesday producers to carefully vet the documents associated with the story, as they would have to authenticate “every syllable” once the story hit. Not only did no one at CBS appear to pay attention to him, but they went out of their way to violate his order. If that describes Heyward’s influence on the division accurately, then Moonves should have terminated him along with the other four. Executives with no internal respect have little chance of forcing any change, and clearly no one respects Andrew Heyward inside CBS News.
It may not matter anyway, according to despondent CBS staffers. Despite Moonves’ cheery memo yesterday promising a return to glory, the CBS News staff sees their day fading quickly into a sunset:

“We have no juice,” the staff member said. “We’re a dying business, and this didn’t help us. Some people feel like CBS News could be out of business in five years.”

After the Mapes debacle and CBS’ insistence on avoiding the central cause of it, that may be the best analysis I’ve yet read.
UPDATE: Ace of Trump says the Gray Lady changed this story significantly since its first publication. My, my, my. Don’t they ever learn?

One last thought on the CBS response to the Killian memo debacle, prompted by CQ reader Jim in Chicago. After seeing its storied news division humiliated and its credibility destroyed from its false reporting and the subsequent lies and stonewalling that its team produced, what did CBS do to correct the situation? They fired the producer of the segment, demanded the resignations of a senior VP and two executive producers of the news show.
Last I looked, Andrew Heyward runs CBS News and Dan Rather is its managing editor. Neither one took any positive action to contain the damage or to uncover the fraud. Yet Les Moonves left both men employed with CBS News — Rather in a new, prominent position and Heyward in place as its president. Are we to conclude that both men are empty suits with no real function, and therefore no responsibility? Or is CBS just offering us some lower-level players to mollify the public? Because as long as Heyward still runs CBS News, it appears to me that the same thing could easily happen again, through incompetence if nothing else.

Bill O’Reilly issues a scathing editorial on all those who dared to criticize Dan Rather over the forgeries used in the 60 Minutes story on George Bush’s Air National Guard service. According to O’Reilly, Rather’s torment at the hands of critics using (gasp!) the First Amendment to speak out against him shows that the American system of innocent until proven guilty has been utterly discarded.
What a load of horse puckey.

The ordeal of Dan Rather goes far beyond the man himself. It speaks to the presumption of guilt that now rules the day in America. Because of a ruthless and callow media, no citizen, much less one who achieves fame, is given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations or personal attacks. The smearing of America is in full bloom.

The presumption of innocence relates to criminal proceedings, Bill, not media criticism. Criticism doesn’t equate to legal action, and the cure is either countercriticism — which CBS News and Rather apologists delivered in spades — or admitting the obvious: the documents were forgeries and CBS screwed up. To this date, Rather has only done the former.

That smear came on the heels of the “Swift boat” attacks on John Kerry, an ordeal that may have cost him the election. While some of the Vietnam vets had valid points, more than a few of the accusations against Kerry were simply untrue.

We hear this a lot, but no one who makes that suggestion ever comes up with a single argument from the Swiftvets that was proven false, let alone “more than a few”. O’Reilly doesn’t back this up, either, making himself a hypocrite for at least the first time in this piece.

Right-wing talk radio in particular pounded Kerry and also bludgeoned Dan Rather for his role in another smear incident – the charges against President Bush about his National Guard service. Again, Rather was found guilty without a fair hearing.

Fair hearing? Rather used the broadcast medium of CBS to constantly defend himself, hardly a mismatch against Rather.

Charges that he intentionally approved bogus documents that made Bush look bad were leveled and widely believed. It was chilling.

Perhaps that’s because he told the nation that he personally vouched for the authenticity of the documents, Bill. Even today, after we’ve found out that CBS’s own experts warned them the documents could not be authenticated and every accredited expert in the field has thoroughly debunked them, Rather and CBS have yet to admit they’re forgeries. They only admit that they aren’t “thoroughly authenticated”. Issuing bulls**t statements like that and stonewalling the critics got Rather and CBS in the hot water they’re in.

It may be true that Rather did not vet the information supplied to him by producers, but few anchor people do.

Rather is more than the anchor at CBS News, he’s also the managing editor. Isn’t he supposed to be responsible for what gets broadcast on CBS News? Or is that just a phony title, meant to build up his credibility through fraud?

But holding a political point of view is the right of every American, and it does not entitle people to practice character assassination or deny the presumption of innocence. Dan Rather was slimed.

Oh, grow up. If Dan Rather can’t take criticism about how he performs his job, then he should have gotten out of the media business a long time ago. And to reiterate the point, Rather hasn’t been charged with a crime, he’s being criticized in the same manner that he and his cohorts at 60 Minutes have made careers off of doing to others. As has Bill O’Reilly, for that matter.

Let me ask you something: In the future, do you think potential public servants and social crusaders are going to risk being brutally attacked within this insane system?

Dan Rather is NOT a public servant. He has made a very lucrative career appearing in front of a camera and pretending to be a journalist. If free speech is an “insane system”, perhaps you’d like to tell us what you’d replace it with, Bill. Would we all need licenses to dare offer criticism of Dan Rather? Or do you believe we should all sit quietly and watch whatever CBS tells us without a hint of dissent?

Dan Rather did not get what he deserved in this case. He made a mistake, as we all do, but he is not a dishonest man. Unfair freedom of speech did him in. This is not your grandfather’s country anymore.

“Unfair freedom of speech” … I wonder how many of your victims would have said the same thing, Bill. George Bush could certainly make the same claim after the TANG story. If that’s your position, then Dan Rather should have been tried for his participation in the story and possibly jailed, or at least silenced by the government, for his role. Is that what you propose for America, Bill?
Get a grip and a clue, O’Reilly. If Dan can’t handle the criticism, then perhaps he shouldn’t have sat behind the big desk in the first place. If he hadn’t personally vetted the material as you say, then this “honest man” lied to the American public when he told us he personally vouched for its authenticity. He still can’t bring himself to admit that he lied and his producers knowingly aired a story based on documents that they had been warned were not authenticated. Only through the efforts of Rather’s critics did the truth finally come out.
That’s what should interest you, Bill — the truth. If your first priority is to Dan Rather instead of the truth, you’re in the wrong business and you should get out. Now.
UPDATE: Read Sissy’s succinct take on Bill O’Reilly, too. Winfield Myers has a longer exposition dismantling O’Reilly’s piece, and suggests a new phrase for this kind of mental breakdown — an O’Reilly Fracture. Read his post to get the definition. I like it!

CBS has announced Dan Rather’s resignation from the anchor and managing editor positions for CBS Evening News. CBS calls it “retirement,” even though in the same breath they announce that Rather will continue to work for 60 Minutes as an investigative reporter:

Dan Rather, embattled anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” announced Tuesday that he will step down in March, on the 24th anniversary of taking over the job from Walter Cronkite.
The veteran anchor has been under fire in recent months for his role in a “60 Minutes Wednesday” story that questioned President Bush’s service in the National Guard, which turned out to based on allegedly forged documents.
Rather, 73, said he will continue to work for CBS, as a correspondent for both editions of “60 Minutes.”

Two years ago, this announcement would have been a blockbuster. By this point, the reaction will mostly focus on why CBS waited so long to make the announcement. Rather had long since squandered any semblance of credibility even before he “personally vouched” for the authenticity of forged documents that CBS used to smear President Bush. He leaves an incredibly damaged news organization in his wake, which won’t recover until after his departure and that of Andrew Heyward, CBS News President.
CBS now has to find a fresh face to slap onto its tired and crumbling news division. It should also find some fresh faces for its management.
UPDATE: CBS has its own report on Rather’s resignation, and it seems a bit strange for a retrospective on a presumably beloved figure in the news division:

The triumvirate of Rather, Brokaw and ABC’s Peter Jennings has ruled network news for more than two decades. Rather dominated ratings after taking over for Cronkite during the 1980s, but he was eclipsed first by Jennings and then by Brokaw. His evening news broadcast generally runs a distant third in the ratings each week.
His hard news style was mixed with a folksy Texan style that led him to rattle off homespun phrases on Election Night. But odd incidents dogged him: In 1987 he walked off the set, leaving CBS with dead air, to protest a decision to let a tennis match delay the news.

I’m thinking that the news division may have delighted in the opportunity to point out a few of the emperor’s flaws now that he’s passing from the scene.

Alert CQ reader Samuel Silver sent me this article from the archives of CBS News — the same organization that helped prepped NYTrogate with the New York Times — which shows that the Third Infantry Division had reached Al Qaqaa and discovered thousands of vials of a mysterious powdered explosive by April 3, 2003 (coincidentally, my birthday):

U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare at an industrial site south of Baghdad. But a senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the materials were believed to be explosives.
Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the materials were found Friday at the Latifiyah industrial complex just south of Baghdad. … The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa [emph mine — CE].

Troops of the 3ID discovered thousands of boxes, each with three vials of white powder, the form in which the explosive agents that the IAEA claim went missing were stored. From this description, it sounds as if the material left at Al Qaqaa would have only been samples or starter materials, as storing 380 tons of powdered explosive in vials would have taken most of Baghdad to store.
Nevertheless, the contemporaneous CBS report showed that the 3ID knew what they had at Al Qaqaa and did more than just a cursory look around the joint to go sightseeing. They suspected that the facility held WMD or chemical-weapons manufacturing capability. A bottle labeled “tabun,” a nerve agent, was found with a small amount of the chemical inside. The troops also discovered atropine stored at the bunker, an antidote for nerve agents, making them very suspicious of the shells stored at Al Qaqaa.
With all of the pressure on the Bush administration to find WMD, does anyone seriously think for a moment that they left Al Qaqaa without checking for UNSCOM and/or IAEA seals? From the description that CBS gave at the time, the Army took a very close look at the materiel at Al Qaqaa:

The senior U.S. official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the material was under further study. The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said.
“Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we’re still going through the place,” the official said. …
The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as Feb. 18.

The idea that various Army units showed up at the weapons facility and strolled around a few minutes before moving up the road to Baghdad, leaving the lights on and the front door unlocked, looks more and more ridiculous. The Army knew very well what it had found, and it searched the bunkers carefully looking for the most dangerous and high-priority items.
Shame on CBS for not even checking its own archives in order to research their hit piece on Bush. Shame also on the NY Times for not reviewing the embeds for the units in the area during the invasion to verify the contemporaneous reporting. Even if one wants to write a hit piece, doing the proper research should be a basic part of the job.
UPDATE: Several CQ readers also found this story at Fox from April 4, 2003:

U.N. weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex — most recently on March 8 — but found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 25 miles south of Baghdad.
Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of 2-by-5-inch boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.
Initial reports suggest the powder is an explosive, but tests are still being done, a senior U.S. official said. If confirmed, it would be consistent with what the Iraqis say is the plant’s purpose, producing explosives and propellants.

Again, it appears that the 3ID performed much more than a cursory search and came up with laboratory samples of the HMX and/or RDX, but not the massive amounts the IAEA claimed was stored at Al Qaqaa. Fox reported that the Army had plenty of suspicion about that site and thought it likely that the Iraqis had either manufactured or stored WMD there.