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Five questions the CBS 60 Minutes panel didn't answer
Last week, the tortured saga of the bogus documents came to a close. Or at least the major issues were settled of how CBS News came to rely on--and then adamantly defend--dubious records of President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. As the investigative panel chosen by CBS, former Associated Press CEO Louis Boccardi and former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh, reported in exhaustive detail, 60 Minutes Wednesday aired a segment on Sept. 8 that was tainted in almost every regard. But the report doesn't resolve all the questions that spring from the story of how producer Mary Mapes, with a barely engaged Dan Rather as her correspondent, rushed the story onto air. Yes, we know that Mapes obtained photocopies of National Guard documents from a longstanding Bush critic, former Texas Army National Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. And we know about what happened: According to the report, Mapes came to believe fervently in the authenticity of the documents that purported to show Bush getting into the Guard through favoritism and then avoiding punishment for breaking rules. The panel says the producer ignored evidence that the documents might be false and she skirted the truth when dealing her supervisors at CBS as the story was haphazardly vetted and then thrown on the air. And then, when the blogosphere erupted with withering critiques of the documents, CBS News spent 12 long days denying the obvious. Rather's exit from theEvening News was hastened by the scandal. Three CBS executives were asked to resign last week. Mapes was fired. CBS announced new rules for its newsgathering operation. But the story is hardly over, and plenty of questions remain.
1 WHO REALLY WROTE THE DOCUMENTS?
Despite the investigative panel's exhaustive fact-gathering, Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi did not even attempt to answer the biggest question of all in this matter. But the report does contain come intriguing information. On Aug. 25, two weeks before the fateful CBS broadcast, Bill Burkett wrote a commentary for Linda Starr and Bev Conover's anti-Bush Web site Online Journal that included a passage with this warning: "George W. Bush, you may be the president. But I know you lied"...