CBS Went Easy on Rather, Critics Say

Dan Rather had already been cranking out reports from the Republican National Convention when he jumped to coverage of a hurricane in Florida. Then news came that former President Clinton would undergo heart bypass surgery.

The veteran CBS anchor didn’t have a lot of time to focus on the scoop he would soon air: that documents seemed to show how President Bush had shirked his duty as a young pilot in the Texas Air National Guard.

Rather told the head of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, he knew the story was so controversial as to be “radioactive,” according to the report on the story and its failures released Monday by an independent panel.

But what Rather also told the panel -- and what became a central finding of the review -- was that he had extreme confidence in Mary Mapes, the award-winning producer who was putting together the Air National Guard story. The powerful alliance of Rather and Mapes helped power the flawed story onto the air, according to the 224-page review of the CBS story by former Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, former president of Associated Press.

As a result, CBS on Monday fired Mapes and asked two other producers and a vice president in its news division to resign. The moves brought praise as well as complaints that others deserved rebuke, particularly Heyward and Rather, for decades the most public face of the network’s news operation.

Although Rather, 73, had announced that he would step down in March as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” some critics said Monday that he should be dropped as a reporter on “60 Minutes Wednesday,” where he planned to remain.

“He is really the responsible person in the public mind,” said Leo J. Flynn, who teaches “American Politics in a Media Age” at Pomona College. “This is really a central issue and an issue that overrides even his years of laudable and distinguished service.”

Linda Mason, a CBS veteran who was named Monday to the new position of senior vice president for standards and special projects, said on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” that Rather’s hectic schedule meant that “he was not as involved as he should have been.”

Ironically, Matthew W. Sheffield, co-editor of the website RatherBiased.com -- which accused the anchor of a liberal bias -- seemed willing to say that Rather’s upcoming departure as anchor was sufficient punishment. “He was the one who had more humiliation than anyone else did,” said Sheffield.

Thornburgh and Boccardi’s report depicts a hard-charging “60 Minutes” operation where Mapes’ drive to get the Bush National Guard story overwhelmed good judgment, a contention that the Emmy-winning producer hotly contested in her own statement Monday.

“Rather gave Mapes considerable responsibility to produce stories, in part due to the great confidence and respect that he had for her work, and in part due to the demands of Rather’s other duties at CBS News,” the report said.

Mapes said in her statement that she was “terribly disappointed” in the panel’s findings. She said her “superiors,” including Heyward, had decided to go ahead with the report. Mapes focused on the fact that the Thornburgh-Boccardi report had not reached a conclusion about the authenticity of the National Guard memos whose veracity was questioned.

“Contrary to the conclusions of the panel, I vetted all aspects of the story with my editors,” Mapes wrote. “In fact, as I have always done with my editors, I told them everything.”

She concluded: “If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me.”

Mapes and Rather had first made a run at a report on Bush’s National Guard service during the then-Texas governor’s first run for the White House in 1999. Then in August 2004, Mapes learned that a onetime guardsman reported he might have “a previously unreleased document” related to Bush’s Guard service, which kept him out of combat duty in Vietnam, according to the report.

The report found that Mapes and others did “virtually nothing” to verify memos released by former Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, despite Burkett’s well-documented animosity toward Bush.

“She was a star,” said a CBS employee who asked not to be named. “I think that a lot of people gave her a lot of leeway because of her reputation.”