1115.org

When you have CNN criticizing your journalism with a big red banner, you may have made a serious error.

By now, every man, woman, and coma patient has heard about Dan Rather and CBS’s National Guard document problem. Media outlets love to gloat. Who knew?

Of course CBS erred in not properly vetting their sources and used suspect “experts” to authenticate the documents. Let’s face it, when you get outed by a Freeper, it might be time to head back to Journalism 101.

But CBS’s real crime has been totally lost in the firestorm. And the irony is thick.

Rather’s document piece was a last minute substitution on 60 Minutes. To make time in the program, CBS bumped a piece about the so-called Niger-Uranium documents that included reporting by Josh Marshall.

A bit of background: Documents indicating that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the country of Niger were used as one of the reasons for the Iraq war. The President even mentioned the already-disproven documents in his 2003 State of the Union speech, leading to the oft-mentioned “16 words.” This in turn led to Ambassador Joe Wilson disclosing the details of his trip to Niger where he learned that the documents could not have been real, which then led to someone in the White House leaking the name of Wilson’s wife and blowing her cover as a CIA agent. All very complicated, yes.

Since the story broke, Marshall and a few other reporters have been digging into the origin of the forged documents on the idea that since they were used to take this country to war, it might be important to know who created them and why they were ever believed in the first place. You can read about Marshall’s work and how he got scooped by the Times of London here.

Well, we now know that Marshall’s bad luck with this story is inversely proportionate to his quality reporting. First he gets scooped by a daily newspaper because he’s working on a story for a monthly magazine, then he gets bumped from TV by a story because someone else forged documents. Snakebit.

Back to CBS and their chief journalistic sin, laziness. Because Rather and his producer didn’t fully back up their story, they ran a segment that was factually inaccurate. In addition, and most frustrating, the documents they based their story on didn’t even bring anything new to the public debate on the President’s National Guard service.

But CBS chose to run the National Guard story because it is easy to tell, and bumped the Niger forgery story because it would have been more complicated to set up and explain. In short, CBS thinks you are stupid.

So how does CBS plan to get repair their tattered reputation and prove that they are a serious news organization who wants to expose the truth? They postpone the Niger story until after the election, of course.

Why?

“We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election,” the spokeswoman, Kelli Edwards, said in a statement.

Why indeed. Can’t have the facts interfering with the script.

Looks like CBS has earned every bit of ridicule they have received.