CBS Admits Mistake

True to his word, Dan Rather took to the airwaves and apologized for not doing more to investigate the memos that have unleashed a firestorm against CBS News. I believed what he was saying and that he wouldn’t have used the falsified documents if he knew that the source was lying to hurt President Bush.

I think that CBS and other networks will soon tighten their journalistic standards of proof and verification as is taught in most journalism classes. It seems like many of the networks are ignoring the two-or-more source rule to get their stories onto the airwaves and onto the Internet before their competition does.

Dan Rather’s interview was quite good. His responses were delivered much better than the interviewer’s questions were, that’s for sure. She seemed to be intimidated to be asking her boss these kinds of tough questions. He seemed genuinely sorry that he and his team didn’t do as much as they could have to verify the documents before they went on the air. Rather’s excellent speaking style saved the interview from the reporter doing the interview, who appears to need a little more time in front of the mike and camera.

Now that CBS has admitted it screwed up, it can get back to reporting the news instead of being the news. One interesting note: the other networks are not taking advantage of CBS’s vulnerability and sticking it to Dan Rather because they all know that they may be in a similar situation down the road. As hard as they try, honest mistakes do happen, and I hope all the networks are big enough to admit when they’ve made a royal screw-up.

I would be even happier if the major networks would keep their politics to themselves and just report the news. The way that I see things, Fox News is a needed conservative counterbalance to more liberal networks which do a poor job of presenting both sides of an argument. Fox does not do a good job of presenting both sides either, but we can watch both liberal and conservative news outlets and decide where we stand on the issues. That's what's great about having a free press.

When it crosses the line and writes the news instead of reporting it, that's when we ought to stand up and demand that networks follow their own rules and forget about what their competition is doing.

There are many more questions to be answered, but it was a good start tonight.