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March 13, 2005
How Not to do Investigative Reporting
Gerald Dworkin:
March 13, 2005
There is an extremely interesting document available here. It is the independent
investigation of the CBS handling of four documents relating to President
Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. The report was commissioned by CBS and headed by Richard Thornburgh, former US Attorney
General. It is 234 pages in length, so
one is unlikely to read it in its entirety, but even spending half and hour
skipping around in it is fascinating and rewarding.
This is a thorough investigation of how CBS pursued
this story, how it vetted the authenticity of the documents, and how it
responded when the blogosphere began to criticize the story within hours of its
broadcast. The lessons that I have drawn
from it are many and various. I give
only my conclusions, and readers will have to determine from reading the
document whether they agree or not.
1) This
is a case-book example of how not to do an investigative report. The producers and reporters of this story
were, at the least, negligent at every step in the investigation. They failed to consider the biases of their
witnesses. They failed to authenticate
the documents. They ignored considerable evidence that the documents were not
authentic. They aired misleading excerpts from on-camera interviews. They
misrepresented the views of their witnesses in voice-over commentaries. They ignored testimony that contradicted
their claims. They failed to even
contact the supposed source of the documents.
2) The
major source of these failures was the competitive pressure to be the first to
broadcast the story. A number of print
sources were buzzing around this story and it was clear that people were
willing to sacrifice accuracy for the “scoop.”
3) Given that these were highly-accomplished
professionals—the lead producer was one of the first to expose the Abu Ghraib
scandal—there had to be a large element of self-deception to allow for the
mistakes in (1). They had to convince
themselves, against considerable evidence, about such things as the
qualifications of the document examines they used, what the examiners actually said, how reliable the person who handed over the
documents was, whether they could
explain away the various typographical criticisms of the document that the
bloggers came up with immediately, etc. All this of course was made easier by the immense time pressures to
publish the story first.
4) The
CBS response to the story in the two weeks after the criticisms emerged was as
immoral as the story itself. Statements
were issued in justification of the authenticity of the documents that were as
misleading as the original story. Such
misleading comments on the story continue to this day. Dan Rather on a recent David Letterman
program said that the Thornburgh report did not state that the documents were
inauthentic. It is true that the report
says that it “was not able to reach a definitive conclusion as to the
authenticity of the [Killian} documents.” But no sane person can read the many pages devoted to the “substantial
questions regarding the authenticity of the [Killian} documents” without coming
to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly likely that they are not authentic.
5) I
do not believe any fair-minded reader could deny that President Bush is owed an
apology by CBS news for the disgraceful airing of this story. It is particularly disgraceful that the story
was aired in the closing months of the presidential campaign.
6) The
power of the internet to tap the specialized knowledge of hundreds of ordinary
people and bring it to the attention of a wide number of readers is
astounding. Some people knew about
typewriters, some people knew about kinds of type, some people knew about what
forms of abbreviation were in common use in the Texas ANG in 1972, some people
knew the details about the chain of command, some people knew that one of the
persons who was supposed to be exercising influence was retired. Much of this emerged with 12 hours of the
story being broadcast!
7) The
Bush administration has been legitimately criticized for its use of prepackaged phony news stories (See Sunday New York Times for a lengthy story), and its hiring of commentators to spread its message under the guise of independent commentary. We should be no less critical of reporting that is supposedly favorable to liberal causes.
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