CBS News will postpone a prepared segment questioning one of the Bush administration’s rationales for invading Iraq, the New York Times reported Saturday in a little-noted story tucked away at the bottom of page A12.
Clearly, that move is a response to the furor over the networks’ use of documents that questioned President Bush’s National Guard service, and which CBS now says it cannot authenticate. Dismayed CBS staffers confirmed that over the weekend, describing to Newsweek a network frozen in its tracks — and one that has decided that, because of the flawed National Guard story, that it can no longer legitimately present reporting that implicitly questions presidential decisions in the weeks leading up to the election.
A CBS spokeswoman said only that “it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the election.”
Campaign Desk is confused by the word “inappropriate” here. The story in question apparently details how the administration relied on false documents (there’s that word “documents” again) when it said that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger last year. Either the report is thoroughly researched and holds up — or not. If it doesn’t, kill it; if it does, air it. (There’s a further irony here as well; the Niger segment was the one bumped at the last minute on Sept 8th to make way for the doomed report on Bush’s Guard service, a story CBS regarded as “highly competitive” and one being pursued by other journalists, the Times reported.)
It seems clear, then, that public relations concerns won out over the journalistic imperative to get to the bottom of something and then tell what you have found. In this case, those concerns took the form of the network’s fear that going with the story would confirm the suspicions of some on the right that CBS News is driven by anti-Bush animus.
And maybe airing the report would cause outcry, confirming the worst suppositions of Bush partisans. But if CBS News truly believes that it no longer has the credibility to report fairly on crucial political issues, it should just shut down entirely. You can’t call yourself a reputable news operation if you’re too gun-shy to run with your own original work during an election campaign.
Better — and braver — would be to acknowledge the flaws of the now-notorious Guard story and start fresh, reporting every story, including the phony Niger uranium, without fear or favor.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.