Rather and CBS: Melting Down

Document Expert Says CBS Ignored Memo 'Red Flags' (Howard Kurtz, Washington Post)

Two document experts retained by CBS News for the disputed "60 Minutes" story on President Bush's National Guard record said yesterday they had warned the program that the memos involved had significant problems but that their concerns were not heeded.

"What I was finding was a lot of red flags," Emily Will told The Washington Post last night. She said she listed five concerns in an e-mail three days before last Wednesday's broadcast and that in a call to a producer the day before the program, "I repeated all my objections as strongly as I could." Will said she told the producer: "If you air the program on Wednesday, on Thursday you're going to have hundreds of document examiners raising the same questions."

In a separate telephone interview, Linda James said that she told CBS the documents "had problems" and that she had questioned "whether they were produced on a computer."

Asked whether CBS took her concerns seriously, James said: "Evidently not."

Increasingly, it appears that Dan Rather and CBS News willfully aired a story with implications for the Presidential election despite the fact that even its own experts had doubts about the supporting materials.

That's a violation of the public trust made even more serious by the fact that the network operates on bandwidth "owned" by the public and administered by the FCC. This is far more serious than the little boy who exposed Janet Jackson's breast for a couple of seconds.

Beldar is right: Dan Rather and CBS News have committed fraud, and must be held to account.

MORE: Catch This If You Can, Dan: Forger Cries Hoax (Deborah Orin and Ian Bishop, NY Post)

Rather's Other Imploding 'Scoop' (Eric Fettmann, NY Post)

Schieffer: CBS Needs to Prove Memos on Bush Were Authentic (Dave Dreeszen, Sioux City Journal)

Casting Further Doubt (Brian Ross and Howard Rosenberg, ABC News)

Retorting 101 (Andrew Sullivan, TNR)

Blogs Take Lead Role in CBS Memo Furor (Ed Carson, Investor's Business Daily)

Dan's Scoop is as Shaky as his Status (Zev Chafets, NY Daily News)

Posted by Kevin Whited | 09/15/04 09:38 AM GMT-6 | Society and Culture

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