CBS News dismisses 4 over 'For the Record'

NEW YORK -- CBS News dismissed four staffers and appointed a new standards czar Monday, after an independent panel issued an exhaustive and highly critical report on how questionable documents -- and a frenzied rush to trump competitors -- led the network to air a high-stakes story about President Bush's military service last September that turned into a journalistic and political debacle.

Now the venerable news division, home of pioneering broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and for years the crown jewel of the so-called "Tiffany Network," must repair the damage as it seeks to restore its credibility under difficult circumstances: Its prime-time newscast ranks third among the big three networks. It remains beset by conservative critics who say the organization is driven by liberal bias.

And, although he was not among those forced out Monday, anchor Dan Rather, who presented the controversial "60 Minutes Wednesday" piece on air, retires in March.

The 244-page report, scathing in its summation, said CBS' handling of the story was flawed at almost every turn -- from the reporting that began in haste in late August to the internal process for reviewing the authenticity of 30-year-old documents, and even after ward, when questions were raised by bloggers and other journalists.

CBS News' problems with the story, the panel said, were the result of "a myopic zeal" to be first with a new story about Bush's military service, causing the network to fall short of its own core principles of accuracy and fairness.

The panel, led by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press executive Louis D. Boccardi, lambasted the network for "considerable and fundamental deficiencies" in preparing and later defending the story.

Aired on Sept. 8, the "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment raised serious allegations about Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in the midst of a tight presidential race.

The "60 Minutes Wednesday" story, entitled "For the Record," alleged that Bush had received favorable treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War era.

The story offered as evidence four documents allegedly written by Bush's late former commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, in 1972 and 1973. One of the documents stated that a retired Air National Guard general had put pressure on officers to "sugar coat" Bush's evaluation; another indicated Killian recommended that Bush's flight status be suspended for failing to meet Guard standards and not taking a required physical. All of the documents were supposedly photocopies from Killian's personal files and were not part of the military's official records.

Even after serious questions had been raised about the "60 Minutes" story, the panel found, CBS News offered a "strident defense" of the story without fully investigating potential problems.

The news division also allowed many employees who worked on the original story to work on subsequent pieces defending the story, the panel found. And the network issued inaccurate press statements that, among other things, declared that the source of the documents was "unimpeachable" and that experts had deemed them authentic, the panel said.

The panel said some CBS staffers compared the events leading up to the story's airing as a "perfect storm," in which multiple factors led to an overall failure of institutional safeguards. Among them: Howard had just taken over as chief of "60 Minutes Wednesday," other producers deferred to Rather and producer Mary Mapes and a "zealous belief in the truth of the segment" that may have "led many to disregard some fundamental journalistic principles."

The network terminated Mapes, the once-acclaimed producer who prepared the report.

"60 Minutes Wednesday" executive producer Josh Howard and a top deputy, Mary Murphy, will also lose their jobs, as will Betsy West, CBS News' senior vice president of prime time. West was the highest-ranking news executive to be disciplined in the matter. CBS also appointed a longtime news executive, Linda Mason, as a standards czar to help vet investigative stories in the future.

Rather, who was the correspondent on the Sept. 8 report, was not fired for his role in the broadcast. But CBS chief Leslie Moonves faulted the newsman for "overzealously" defending the report after it was attacked by bloggers and other commentators. Rather had earlier announced that he will retire in March after 24 years behind the anchor's desk.

"We feel that Dan has announced already that he's leaving the (anchor) chair shortly," Moonves said in an interview. "And he will remain with '60 Minutes.' We feel that Dan did his job."

Also spared the ax was Rather's boss, CBS News President Andrew Heyward, who, the independent panel and Moonves said, had conscientiously attempted to verify the report before broadcast.

Many observers were stunned by the harshness of the panel's report. Although CBS commissioned the report, the panel said its conclusions were reached independently and the network had no control over the content of the report.

"It's the sharpest criticism any news organization has ever been subjected to in public," said Marvin Kalb, a former CBS correspondent and senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.

Still, the panel's report seems unlikely to furnish the last word on the scandal. Indeed, even Rather's role in the controversy may not be entirely resolved. The panel's report said that despite his delivery last fall of a widely reported apology for the "60 Minutes" story, the anchor did not "fully agree" with CBS' decision to stop defending the Bush piece and "still believes that the content of the documents is accurate."

Through a representative, Rather declined to comment for this story. "We can't possibly issue a statement today, because we have to read" the report, Kim Akhtar, the anchor's spokeswoman, said.

Bob Schieffer, who sometimes substitutes for Rather on "Evening News," filled in for the anchorman on Monday night's broadcast, which led with a story about the panel's report.

It also seems unlikely that the network will settle the future of "Evening News" any time soon.

"There's no news on that," Moonves said of the search for a new anchor. "We're not even close to a decision."

Attempts to reach Howard, Murphy and West were unsuccessful. But in an e-mail sent to reporters covering the story, Mapes said she was "terribly disappointed in the conclusions of the report and its effects on the four of us who will no longer work at CBS News."

She also criticized Moonves for "vitriolic scape-goating" in his prepared response to the panel's report.

Of the panel's view that the report had been rushed to air, Mapes was emphatic: "Airing this story when it did was ... a decision made by my superiors, including Andrew Heyward. If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me."

Almost as soon as the "60 Minutes Wednesday" report aired on CBS, sharp questions were raised about the veracity of the documents by bloggers. In particular, critics argued that the proportional spacing, superscript "th" and Times New Roman font used in the documents could not have been produced by typewriters in the early 1970s.

CBS News initially insisted that the documents were genuine and stood by the report. The documents had been "thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts," the news division said in a Sept. 9 news release.

But the panel said that statement, as well as others issued by CBS News over the next two weeks, was inaccurate. "(N)o expert had vouched for the authenticity of the documents," the panel report said.

The following day, Sept. 10, Heyward asked West to investigate some of the material used in preparing the "60 Minutes" report, including opinions from the forensic document examiners retained by the producers to authenticate the documents. But the panel said no such investigation was ever done.

"Had this directive been followed promptly, the panel does not believe that '60 Minutes Wednesday' would have publicly defended the segment for another 10 days," the report says.

The network's defense of the story began to crumble on Sept. 16, when the chief source, retired Texas Army National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, began to change his story. He backed away from his initial claim that he got the documents from George Conn, a former Texas Army National Guard officer.

Instead, Burkett said he received the documents from unidentified man at a Houston livestock show in March 2004. Rather flew to Texas to interview Burkett. On Sept. 20, the anchor said on "CBS Evening News" that the network could "no longer vouch" for the documents' authenticity. The panel was commissioned two days later.

Getlin reported from New York, Collins from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Paul Lieberman and James Rainey contributed to this report.