There’s an old saying that you never want to watch either sausage, legislation or journalism being made.
Now that we know a little bit about the internal machinations that led to CBS’ Bill Burkett sausage, several things seem abundantly clear: First, the network rushed to judgment for no clear reason, falling victim to the scoop mentality that has bedeviled journalism for nearly a century and that has only been exacerbated by the 24-7 nature of the news cycle and the fragmentation and proliferation of news media in the Internet era.
Second, in that rush, CBS violated a tenet of journalism first heard by our ears 40 years ago from a crusty city editor who wanted his reporters to trust no source unless verified by independent reporting. (That city editor was one Eugene Sharp, and his gravel-voiced admonition to every reporter was, “Check it out — even if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”) In the case of CBS, it wasn’t Dan Rather’s mother that the network failed to check out, it was a considerably shakier source — a disgruntled partisan who felt shortchanged by the National Guard and by President Bush’s presidency and who warned CBS that the documents needed authentication even as he handed them over. The network compounded the error by making no effort to contact a secondary source whose name Burkett had reluctantly passed along. (Since there was no such person, that check alone could have saved the network the entire embarrassment to come.)
Now that Rather has admitted on air that the network should never have used the documents, and personally apologized to his viewers, we’re left wondering: What was the untoward hurry? What made CBS apparently ignore the advice of its own experts about the authenticity of the documents? (After all, photocopies faxed from a Kinko’s on the edge of Abilene, Texas, don’t immediately scream “real.”) What did the network gain by running the story before it had ironclad assurance that the supporting paperwork was authentic? Where was the skeptical nose of a Eugene Sharp (or a Ben Bradlee, who insisted throughout the Washington Post‘s Watergate investigation that Woodward and Bernstein nail down every fact with two sources, independent of one another) that might have overridden the first-at-all-costs mentality that leads to all sorts of factual errors, ranging from sins of omission (failing to fact-check the candidates, for instance) to errors as multiple as those of CBS ? The pressure to get the “scoop” and beat everyone else to print (or on air) has time and again overwhelmed the better judgment of reporters and editors — certainly it did in CBS’ case. In short, the scoop got in the way of the story.
Next, enter hubris. For all its speed in putting the story on the air, CBS was incredibly slow to admit its mistake. Within moments of CBS’ broadcast on September 8, internet sites and weblogs (conservative and otherwise) had raised questions about the authenticity of the memos. As it turns out, these were very similar to the doubts expressed by two of CBS’ own experts before the segment even aired.
In a classic example of media schadenfreude, other news organizations, many of whom had piggy-backed off the original CBS report, reversed course and ran story after story playing up doubts about the documents.
Yet CBS hung on by its fingernails, putting Marian Knox, former secretary to the late Lt. Col. Killian, on the air last Wednesday to say, no, she didn’t type the documents in question, and they didn’t look authentic to her, although they did reflect Col. Killian’s thoughts and fears at the time. (The first thought that came to mind was that CBS could have saved itself from itself by simply running its initial story past Knox before it aired it instead of after.) But even then, the tenor of Rather’s queries to Knox was more in the vein of a slap at his critics than an admission of error. This was the flip side of the scoop mentality, exposed for all to see; having rushed to air with the story, CBS dug in and resisted yet another journalistic mandate — that of thoroughly and promptly correcting the record when you’ve made a mistake.
In the long run, this story may be remembered as the culmination of a long slide at CBS that began nearly 20 years ago when CBS’ then-new owner Lawrence Tisch imposed the first of many draconian budget cuts that decimated CBS’s once-vaunted reporting and producing ranks. But the network’s mistakes on the nitty gritty level of its reporting in the trenches are ones that are warned against in any beginners’ textbook on reporting and they can’t be blamed on budget cuts; step-by-step, they amount to a litany of failures to follow the most basic principals of responsible journalism:
— If someone hands you a “gift” story, unwrap it very carefully, and vet the giver.
— Even if you fear time is running out (only six weeks until that election, you know) and even if you feel the hot breath of your competitors on your neck, pause, take a deep breath and “check it out.”
— If your source clearly has an ax to grind, trace the story back to his source.
— And if a second party is readily at hand to either confirm or deny the story (Marian Knox comes to mind), track her down before you rush to print or to air, not after.
There’s nothing complicated about any of this. The real story here isn’t political bias on the part of CBS or Rather. It’s that of big news organizations still in the thrall of a scoop mentality that dates back to the 1920’s and Ben Hecht — and still reluctant to come clean even when a story unravels.
Bill McDermott was CJR’s Webmaster.