Rathergate Report is out

The report on the CBS fake memos scandal has been released and CBS has sacked four senior staff who worked on the 60 minutes story.

The full report is around 250 pages and is here as a pdf. Worth reading if you have the time to see how completely lacking in integrity and checks CBS were.

If you want commentary, good blogs on this are:

TVNewser
National Review
Rathergate
Rather Biased

Readers should consider that if a major TV network so totally fails to do even the most basic things right for a major political story just before a presidential election, what reliance you you place on all the other stories?

Overall the independent report seems to have been comprehensive. It has kicked for touch on the issue of political bias saying their actions gave the appearance of bias, but that one could not prove bias. I think it is very obvious that there was – but people will make their own conclusions on that.

The CBS story on themselves is here.

What proved to be the real killer for CBS was not just running the fake story, but their “blind defence” of the story for 12 days after it ran. Indeed to this day Mapes and Rather still defend the story.