So the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel has found fault with the journalistic practices at CBS News, but declined to find "evidence" of "political bias" or document forgery.
That's more than bizarre, since the truth is obvious: the incident itself and all the statements surrounding it are self-evidentiary. The panel's conclusion is analogous to declining to find "evidence" of a broad daylight bank robbery because the thieves refuse to acknowledge that they did anything illegal.
As noted by Power Line, the single best short take on the report so far is by Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard: the report is a "whitewash."
The Thornburgh-Boccardi report deals mostly with the news-gathering practices of CBS, which is all well and good. But what was needed was a definitive accounting of the truth.Surely the blue-ribbon report had the responsibility not merely to critique CBS standards and practices, but to help us find out the truth about the incident at hand. To return to the New York Times analogy, it would be like judging the Jayson Blair case without knowing what he had and hadn't made up. By assiduously avoiding conclusions of any kind, the report has left only one possible conclusion: The Thornburgh-Boccardi panel believes that the way in which CBS went about its business may have been improper, but that the story they produced wasn't necessarily wrong. If anything, this represents a step backward in the official reckoning of the case.
Well, if the documents weren't forged and Mary Mapes acted with no political bias, then her firing would have been unjust and she really would be a scapegoat. But since there is abundant evidence that the documents were forgeries and that political attitudes were important in driving the story, the better conclusion is that the CBS Report is a whitewash.
More solid commentary at TKS, Hugh Hewitt, and WizBang, among others.
Posted by Alan at January 11, 2005 11:51 AM