Friday - September 10, 2004

CBS FORGERY!! MEMOGATE!!

Someone stick a fork in Dan Ra^ther. He’s done.

After being largely confined to the internet and talk radio yesterday, coverage of CBS’s apparent usage of forged documents has exploded into more traditional media outlets with several reports from the Associated Press, multiple stories by ABC News, The New York Times, Fox News Channel, a front-page story in the Washington Post and more.

CBS News hasn’t been so pilloried in the press since Dan Rather’s 2001 keynote speech at a fund-raiser for Texas Democrats. And it is justly being scrutinized today. Against the advice of many of his colleagues, Rather almost single-handedly put a story on the air that had relied on at least two forged documents.

Typographical experts, legacy office equipment collectors, and even the family of the man who supposedly wrote the documents have all called into question CBS’s “scoop.” The fact that a bunch of people working independently on the internet could so readily debunk an obvious forgery tells a very disturbing story about the journalistic practices of a news organization that has allowed one man’s grudge against the Bush family to set its remaining shreds of credibility aflame.

The fiasco is getting so bad that it is tearing up CBS News. Whether news division president Andrew Heyward has the courage to make the changes needed to ensure that his organization is sufficiently ideologically diverse to prevent such an event from happening again is open to question. He has long been known as a toady to Rather and may not have the guts to do what’s right.

One thing is certain, however. Microsoft needs to fix its Auto Correct feature to properly spell CBS’s star anchor’s name without superscripting the “th” in his last name.

To its credit, CBS has included some critical remarks from Gary Killian--the son of Jerry Killian, the deceased man at the center of the controversy--on its Web site.

Unfortunately, though, the Rather-run Evening News decided not to mention the questions surrounding the alleged memos. We also couldn’t help but notice that the CBSNews.com’s Opinion section (which is currently featuring a number of anti-Republican articles and no anti-Democrat ones) has not reprinted any of the media criticism its online partners National Review, and The Weekly Standard, something it was not averse to doing when one of its liberal magazine partners accused the media of being biased against John Kerry.

“In a telephone interview from her Texas home, Killian’s widow, Marjorie Connell, described the records as ‘a farce,’ saying she was with her husband until the day he died in 1984 and he did not ‘keep files.’ She said her husband considered Bush ‘an excellent pilot.’

“‘I don’t think there were any documents. He was not a paper person,’ she said, adding that she was ‘livid’ at CBS. A CBS reporter contacted her briefly before Wednesday night’s broadcasts, she said, but did not ask her to authenticate the records.”

More:

A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network’s sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents’ alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that ‘these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time.’

‘These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people,’ the CBS News official said. ‘Journalistically, we’ve gone several extra miles.’

The official said the network regarded Hodges’s comments as ‘the trump card’ on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas.

Marjorie Connell, who was married to Jerry Killian, the deceased Texas Air National officer who allegedly wrote CBS’s controversial Bush memos appeared on Thursday’s Nightline, blasting the network for promoting “untruths” about her husband.

Some excerpts:

“What aggravated me so much, was that he can not be here to say and yet they can drag his name onto television, making bad accusations about our president and a man that he respected and I know for a fact that he thought this young man as a second lieutenant or first lieutenant was an excellent aviator, an excellent person to be in the guard and was very happy to have him become a member of the 111th F.L.S.”

“Number one, he would not have typed because he did not type. Number two, the wording in these documents is very suspect to me. I just don’t believe that, it looks like some things may have been picked up out of a document and then other things just made fictitiously to fill in things, to make them flow. I just can’t believe that this is his words, my late husband’s words.”

“Not a typist, definitely not a typist. We had no computers at home but he wasn’t a typist, and what is remarkable to me is that he was a person who did not take or make copious notes. he carried everything in his mind and he didn’t have time to make notes.”

“He would just write little notes on the back of anything. unfortunately or fortunately as the case may be, if he needed to jot something down he would jot it on any paper that he could find, on a card, like a calling card that you would have, or just little bits of paper. He always knew where everything was, and if he needed to pull it out of his wallet on a little note or something, but he just didn’t take many notes.”

In an interview with the Washington Post, Connell said she was “livid” at CBS.

In related news, the Houston Chronicle talked more with Jerry Killian’s son, Gary, who expressed further doubts about the CBS documents’ authenticity.

Confirming his mother’s assertion that his father was no typist and that he had no “secret file” where controversial documents would be stored.

“It would have been against his own self-interest to keep a memo like that on file,” Killian told the paper. “It was just not in his nature to do that.”

Killian also said he never saw his father sign documents using his first name and that he believes they are fakes.

Further Reading:

The Washington Post:  “Some Question Authenticity of Papers on Bush”

ABC News: “False Documentation?”

Fox News: “Bush Guard Memos Questioned”

The Weekly Standard: “Is It A Hoax?”

RatherBiased.Com: “What’s New”

Chicago Sun-Times: “Critical memos on Bush’s Guard service faked?”

Update: Now the daughter of Ben Barnes says he lied to CBS ....

A woman purporting to be Amy Barnes, daughter of former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, said Thursday that her father had fabricated claims that he used his influence to get President Bush into the Texas Air National Guard 36 years ago.

In a phone call to WBAP’s Mark Davis radio show in Dallas, Texas, Ms. Barnes told guest host Monica Crowley that her father was an “opportunist” who had lied about Bush’s Guard record during a “60 Minutes II” broadcast Tuesday night.

Posted by The Skipper     on 09/10/2004 at 05:06 AM   
Filed Under: • Media-Bias •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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