The headlines in the newspapers and the 10-second snippets on radio and TV were similar to the one that appeared in the Chicago Tribune last week: "CBS News fires 4 in erroneous Bush story."

Unfortunately, the headlines and summaries were wrong.

Yes, CBS did fire four of its top news people after a two-person independent investigation concluded that the news network failed basic journalistic standards in putting together the "60 Minutes" report on whether George W. Bush got preferential treatment while a member of the Texas Air National Guard.

But that investigation did not find that the Bush story was "erroneous." That has never been determined and likely never will be because the main witness is dead and Bush himself will never tell us the truth. To label the report erroneous, however, is erroneous in itself.

What the investigation, headed by retired Associated Press chief executive Lou Boccardi and former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, did find is that CBS failed to properly authenticate the papers it had been given in which Bush's commanding officer, now deceased, complained about Lt. Bush's Guard service. And because it couldn't have authenticated them if it had followed normal journalistic procedures, it shouldn't have run the story.

Indeed, it hasn't been proved that the papers are authentic. But, then again, it hasn't been proved that they aren't.

An exhaustive review of the whole affair in this month's Columbia Journalism Review, a respected journalism trade magazine, also takes CBS to task for its sloppy report, but it takes news organizations and so-called Web bloggers to task, too, for their reporting of the affair. No one bothered to check, for example, how closely connected to Bush and the Republican Party were the "experts" who immediately claimed the papers were forgeries.

The haphazard way "60 Minutes" handled the story was a disservice, to be sure. Not only did the controversy it created serve to leave Bush off the hook on the preferential treatment allegation, but it created a perception that all the reports about Bush's sorry National Guard record were erroneous. They were not. The same man who is now sending National Guard members on extended tours in Iraq never fulfilled his own obligation back when Vietnam was raging.

And the fact that he never suffered any punishment for failing to do so is proof enough that he did get preferential treatment.

What's worse about this whole affair, though, is the sanctimonious reaction from Bush and his allies over the CBS embarrassment. Some are gleefully claiming that it proves that CBS News and Dan Rather, in particular, have been "biased" against the president all along.

Let's all remember something, however. If anyone should know about problems authenticating documents, it is this administration.

CBS' news team may have failed to properly verify the National Guard commander's memos. The Bush administration's huge intelligence apparatus, on the other hand, failed to authenticate the documents that claimed Saddam Hussein had sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium, that there were chemical and biological weapons stored everywhere in Iraq, or that those Iraqi trailers were really mobile labs to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Whose failure to "authenticate" caused this country more harm?

Dave Zweifel has been editor of The Capital Times since 1983. A native of New Glarus, Wis. and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his life-long goal was to be the editor of this newspaper.

© 2005 Capital Times

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