It has become obvious that Dan Rather and his cabal at CBS News were participants in one of the greatest journalistic dupes in recent years. The question that remains is: How did this happen? I can think of two possible explanations -- one is unflattering, the other is worse. Either Rather and his staff are massively incompetent, or they were willing participants in a scheme of public deception -- pick your poison.
Let's assume, for a start, that the incompetence theory is correct. Plenty of critics have already accused Rather of reportorial sloppiness, so I'm not breaking new ground here. Usually, I would be more hesitant about jumping on the incompetence bandwagon, though, because even the most scrupulous journalists are potential victims of the artful dupe. A talented huckster with the proper amount of time, money and effort at his disposal can deceive the media -- that's just a fact of the business. In the end, journalists are at the mercy of their sources, and if those sources have malicious intent, then there is little to be done but apologize, print their correction and eat their crow.
What's shocking, then, is not the fact that Rather was deceived, but instead the magnitude of the deception involved. A brief recap is in order for anyone who has been avoiding the news media for weeks: last month, Rather aired a story on CBS' "60 Minutes" newsmagazine that accused President Bush of shirking his National Guard duties while he was a guardsman during the Vietnam War. That's old news, and chances are that Dubya -- who has basically admitted that he achieved nothing in life before age 30 -- didn't exactly go out of his way to find things to do for the Texas National Guard. What made Rather's piece unique was that he claimed to have a proverbial smoking gun -- an old memo written by a former National Guard officer stating that Bush had not only reneged on his duties, but that Bush's father had used his political influence to "sugarcoat" his son's official record.
The document was a major coup for CBS News -- until, of course, it turned out to be a forgery, and the story blew up the very day after the segment aired. What's problematic here is not that the document was forged, but that it was such an obvious forgery. For starters, it was typed in Times New Roman -- not the standard-issue font for Vietnam-era army typewriters. The document was a Xerox-of-a-Xerox-of-a-Xerox affair -- just the thing to give it that old-and-grainy look on the cheap. The signature is an obvious fake when compared to other known signatures of the author. In addition, perhaps most damning of all, the line-breaks -- the last words on each line before the text wraps down to the next line -- are the exact same line-breaks created by typing the memo in Microsoft Word. Essentially, CBS News put a Word document on the air and claimed that it was 30 years old.
Therein lies the problem. This document was so obviously bogus that it's incomprehensible that Rather and his crew could have avoided noticing it. Of all the hands that the story passed through before making it on the air, shouldn't at least one person have paused for a second and said, "Uh, guys, do we have a problem here?" If the CBS crew didn't suspect the document was bunk, that means they're bad at their jobs. If they did suspect it, but aired it anyway, then they made themselves party to the deception.
Chances are that the document fit so well with their story idea, with their preconceived notions about Bush, that Rather and crew wanted it to be real. So they convinced themselves that it was and shoved it on the air. The public knowledge that Rather is sympathetic to the Democratic Party doesn't help either. Rather actually gave a speech at a Democratic fundraiser a few years ago, before CBS reprimanded him and forced him to apologize for it. The perception -- regardless of whether or not it's accurate -- will be that Rather is another media lefty who jumped at the chance to stick one to the President, and that can't be the image that CBS wants for its news division.
At first, Rather huffily dismissed accusations that his report was flawed. At the end of September, though, as the pressure mounted, CBS issued a carefully-worded apology that backed away from the story's original claims. While still refusing to admit that its exclusive evidence was bogus, CBS admitted it could not prove the document to be real. An internal investigation is underway, and some poor "60 Minutes" producer will probably get canned as a token act of contrition. Give the network partial credit for almost doing the right thing a week too late.
Maybe I'll help them out and forge a real apology for them. Hey -- I might even get to be on "60 Minutes."
