Robert Zelnick:
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But I felt a sense of professional betrayal as Dan Rather and colleagues defended their 60 Minutes report providing documentary "proof" that George W. Bush had shirked his duties as a Texas air national guardsman and that his superior, Lt. Colonel Jerry B. Killian — now long deceased — had been pressed to "sugar-coat" the affair.
After an odd assortment of bloggers and traditional news organizations raised doubts about what CBS claimed were Killian's notes, the network's position began to unravel. Their source, Bill Burkett, turned out to be a disgruntled former Texas guardsman who had long been on an anti-Bush vendetta.
As a quid pro quo for delivering the material, he had demanded access to a top Kerry campaign official, a request senior 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes obliged, contacting Joe Lockhart days before the piece aired. Burkett would later say he lied about his own source for the documents, something even a desk assistant could have discovered had the CBS team insisted on establishing a chain of custody. Instead, CBS rushed to air despite caveats from its own document experts that serious authenticity questions were unanswered.
Unconscionably, Rather vouched for the documents' authenticity and attacked critics as "partisan." Even after acknowledging he could no longer defend the papers, he offered no retraction of the story, instead claiming that the "heart" of the report attacking the president was unchallenged.
Unchallenged indeed! Without the documents there was no heart of the report, only 30-year-old hearsay. Without them the report would never have made 60 Minutes, or the Evening News, or for that matter, the Podunk Press. What was on display at CBS appears to have been a "get George Bush" mentality — colleagues said Mapes had been working the story for five years — compounded by the abdication of editorial responsibility by those who turn meek in the presence of Rather.
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Zelnick, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University.
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