CBS sacks news staff over Bush TV probe

American broadcasting giant CBS issued a damning independent review of mistakes over an investigative report on President George Bush’s National Guard service, sacking three news executives and a producer for their ”myopic zeal” in rushing it to air.

The review said CBS compounded the damage with a circle-the-wagons mentality once the 60 Minutes Wednesday report came under fire.

The independent investigators added, however, that they found no evidence of a political bias against Bush.

CBS News president Andrew Heyward and veteran anchorman Dan Rather, who announced in November he was stepping down from CBS Evening News, escaped without any disciplinary action. But Rather, who narrated the September 8 story last year and subsequent follow-ups, was criticised by CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves for “errors of credulity and over-enthusiasm”.

“The system broke down on this one, for sure,” said Louis Boccardi, retired chief executive officer of The Associated Press, who conducted the investigation along with former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. They delivered their 224-page report to Moonves last week.

The sacked staff were Mary Mapes, the story’s producer; Josh Howard, executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday; Howard’s top deputy, Mary Murphy; and CBS News senior vice president Betsy West.

The 60 Minutes TV news magazine story had questioned Bush’s Vietnam War-era commitment to service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Mapes began reporting the story in 1999, but the report centred on documents obtained only weeks earlier, supposedly written by Bush’s commander, the late Lt Col Jerry Killian.

The memos said that then 1st Lt Bush did not take a mandatory medical exam and that Killian reportedly felt pressured to sugarcoat an evaluation of him.

Questions were quickly raised about the typed memos, with some document experts saying it appeared they contained a computer character inconsistent with typewriters at the time.

Boccardi and Thornburgh found that Mapes had said the documents were authenticated, when in fact she had found only one expert to vouch for only one signature in the memo. They said she also failed to look into the background of her source, retired Texas Army National Guard Lt Col Bill Burkett; to find Burkett’s source; or to find other corroboration of the charges.

“Her confidential source was not reliable and her authenticators were unable to authenticate the documents, and yet she maintained the opposite. … This is truly disquieting,” Moonves said in a statement released with the report.

Mapes said last night she was “terribly disappointed” by the report’s conclusions. She said she believed the story was corroborated by others and consistent with previously known records, and that the panel was quick to condemn her based on statements from people who said different things to her.

“I am shocked by the vitriolic scapegoating in Les Moonves’ statement,” Mapes said. “I am very concerned that his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations – ratings rather than journalism.”

Mapes said the decision to air the story when it did was made by her superiors, including Heyward, and not by her.

“If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me,” she said.

When the Bush report aired, Mapes was a veteran, respected producer on a professional high: She had produced the “60 Minutes” report last spring that showed the first pictures of Americans mistreating Iraqis in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

The review concluded that accomplishment essentially made her bulletproof despite the delicate, complicated nature of the Bush story, and that Howard, a CBS News veteran who had become chief of 60 Minutes Wednesday in June, and Murphy failed to adequately question her.

West was ordered to review the opinions of document examiners and confidential sources who had supported the story – but no such probe took place, the investigators said.

Scott McClellan, Bush’s press secretary, said he hoped CBS would take steps to “prevent something like this from happening again”.

The independent panelists even faulted CBS’ eventual apology for the story, saying the network placed too much blame on Burkett and not enough on itself.

Rather was portrayed as an overworked anchor who had just finished coverage of the Republican convention and Hurricane Frances in Florida. As a result, he did little to help prepare the original report, and did not even appear to have seen it before it aired, the panel said.

“He asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and over-enthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues,” Moonves said.