Heads roll at CBS

CBS has announced four firings in the wake of the release of the Thornburgh-Boccardi report:

CBS News has fired four employees, including three executives, for their roles in the broadcast of a disputed story about President Bush’s service in the National Guard, the network reported Monday.

The action followed an independent investigation, by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press President Louis Boccardi, that found network failed to follow basic journalistic principles in preparing the piece.

The investigators reported that a “myopic zeal” to break the story about Bush’s National Guard service was a key factor in explaining why CBS News had produced a story that was neither fair nor accurate and did not meet the organization’s internal standards.

The 224-page report not directly fault the correspondent on the story, CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who is stepping down in March.

I'm holding my applause until I've read the complete report. (Links to .pdf files of the report, exhibits and appendices can be found on this page of the Kirkpatrick Lockhart Nicholson Graham website. Michelle Malkin has been digging through this stuff all day and coming up with some great material.)

What the Captain reports, however, makes me a little uneasy: "Oddly, and perhaps covered in better detail later, the report takes no definite position on the documents themselves. Neither does CBS hold Dan Rather responsible for any of the damage, even though the Thornburgh-Boccardi report points out specifically that one of the major failings of CBS was its "inaccurate press statements issued by CBS News after the broadcast of the Segment that the source of the documents was “unimpeachable” and that experts had vouched for their authenticity"—statements made by Dan Rather."

Michelle Malkin finds the report's account of Mary Mapes' ties to the Kerry campaign "quite damning." But the authors themselves appear to sidestep the issue of political bias (other than to say CBS' actions often gave the "appearance" of bias.)

Kevin Aylward still wants to know how Andrew Heyward avoided the axe.

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, has pinpointed a major problem the report: "The one thing the report is clear about is that no political bias ever influenced the process. [Huh?] Even when you have Mapes calling Lockhart, the report insists that this created "the appearance of political bias." (My italics.) Others will parse the report more carefully, I'm sure. But the refusal to acknowledge this blind spot is not encouraging." From what I've been able to read in the past hour or so, I think he's on to something.

David Wissing picks up on the issues highlighted by Andrew Sullivan and the Captain: "From just my quick scan through the report, it appears that the commission skirted the two major issues which really mattered, whether the documents are actually forged and whether the airing of the report was in any way a political attack on President Bush."

Lots of good coverage and analysis at TVnewser, Jim Geraghty's KerrySpot, INDC Journal, RatherBiased and RatherGate. (I feel Dick Thornburgh aging by the minute.)

Scrappleface notes that the release of the report is helping the Dems turn up the heat on Donald Rumsfeld.

Still waiting to see what the boys at Power Line and LGF (which seems to be experiencing some technical difficulties) have to say.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice adds: "Perhaps the biggest issue is how could a bunch of highly paid executives and Rather violate basic journalistic confirmation rules that are taught in any Journalism 101 class and not confirm this report? The panel details the steps that led to the report getting on the air and takes them to task. And, yes, competition is heated. But it still does NOT explain (from what we've read so far) in highly specific terms exactly how the basic checks and balances of solid confirmation were suspended and precisely WHY—even in the light of the warnings the network received." I think his question is answered by the report—albeit obliquely—in Appendices 1 and 2 of the report. CBS had standards and procedures in place and knowingly violated them. To understand WHY they did so—which we rightly assume to be because they were motived by political bias—enters into the area of motive, which the panel deliberately chose to avoid.

I think it's important to keep in mind that this was a fact-finding investigation, not a prosecution—and the panel has done a pretty thorough job as to the facts.  (Much more, in fact, than we in the blogosphere had been led to expect.)

Certainly, the report can't fairly be described as a "whitewash," in the words of a commenter to this blog. As the report states (to the frustration of many, most eloquently James Last), "the Panel will not level allegations for which it cannot offer adequate proof." And, as any prosecutor will tell you, motive is the most difficult of all things to prove. So the report leaves us with "just the facts, ma'am"—but some very powerful facts nonetheless.

James Dwight says at Soxblog, "This is a solid document, and while it fails to deliver the visceral satisfaction that we longed for, it completely vindicates and validates the efforts of Powerline, LGF et. al and leaves the blogosphere stronger than ever."

And the Thornburgh-Boccardi report certainly won't be the last word on the subject.