Last fall, CBS ran a story detailing how President Bush leapt ahead of thousands of more qualified applicants to join the Texas Air National Guard, thereby-perhaps coincidentally-avoiding service in Vietnam. That story wasn't new, of course, because London's Guardian newspaper broke it in 1999, pointing out how political strings had been pulled to get the sons of several political insiders into the Guard. Though the Guardian story was thoroughly sourced and has never been challenged, CBS also reported, based on the \Killian memos,"" that Bush received special treatment within the Guard. CBS relied on these documents even though they could not be authenticated. This show of credulous journalism is sadly not remarkable, but the reaction to it is both remarkable and instructive. It reveals not political bias, but bias toward power.
The memos, allegedly written by Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, suggest Bush's performance in the Guard was lackluster. Though typographical evidence suggests they are not genuine, witnesses have come forward to suggest the content of the memos was accurate.
Marian Carr Knox was Killian's secretary. She claims, ""Mr. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems"" with Bush's service, and that, though the memos are ""not real,"" they are ""correct"" in substance. ""The information in them is correct,"" she said, ""It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together.""
This, then, was CBS' crime: It correctly reported that Chicken-Hawk George, despite scoring in the 25th percentile, beat out the three-quarters of applicants who were more qualified for a spot in the Guard. Furthermore, they added that once Bush illicitly gained entrance, he received special treatment within the Guard.
Though both claims are true, CBS' proof of the latter is weak. For this crime, CBS submitted to what it called an ""independent review panel"" to determine what punishment was due.
The ""independent"" panel consisted of Dick Thornburgh, George H. W. Bush's attorney general, and Louis Boccardi, who, as CEO of The Associated Press, killed his own organization's story exposing the Iran-Contra scandal. That's right-the best, most impartial panel they could come up with was two clear Bush partisans: one part of Papa Bush's cabinet and the other a man with so much contempt for journalistic ethics that he spiked the biggest story of the 1980s to protect traitorous backroom deals.
Despite the panel's clear conflict of interest, it was unable to state conclusively that the Killian memos were forgeries. Furthermore, it found no evidence of political bias in CBS' reporting. What the panel did find was that reporters cut corners, systematically failing to check their sources' claims. As punishment for this failure, the panel set to work purging CBS employees. That's right, the punishment for cutting corners is being fired-in a story critical of the president, at least. One wonders why they didn't just allow Karl Rove to decide who would be fired directly.
Not surprisingly, the first journalist shown the door was producer Mary Mapes. Perhaps that's because she was the most culpable for shoddy fact checking. But maybe it's because the piece was critical of Bush. Maybe it's because Mapes produced the expos?? of torture at Abu Ghraib for CBS, when other networks received the very same material and declined to air it. The fallout from the torture scandal seriously hurt Bush's credibility. No doubt he would have preferred CBS to sit on the story like the other networks.
Perhaps it's because she tried to produce a piece reporting the wrongful expunction of blacks from voter rolls in Florida, another story damaging to Bush. By firing Mapes, the panel both silenced a courageous journalist and sent the clear message to others that criticizing Bush can lead to harsh retribution.
When a journalist gets caught taking shortcuts in a story critical of the president, she loses her job. But when a journalist gets caught taking shortcuts elsewhere, say by publishing questionable allegations about Social Security's solvency without verifying sources' claims, she faces no such sanctions. Notably, the White House sold the American people the war in Iraq on spurious claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but no one has punished reporters who unquestioningly repeated such claims, even when obviously untrue (recall, for example, The New York Times reporting that ""all of Iraq is one large storage facility"" for WMD).
The lesson here is simple: There's no punishment for printing unverified allegations, so long as they serve the president's agenda. That's clear proof of bias all right-bias in favor of President Bush.
opinion@dailycardinal.com.
