CBS News Denies N.Y. Post Allegation Its Afghan War Coverage Was Faked

CBS News said Wednesday that it was standing by the accuracy of its coverage of the war in Afghanistan in the wake of a newspaper report that said it had aired faked battle footage and false news accounts in the mid-1980s.

The allegation was contained in a front-page story Wednesday in the New York Post. Most of the questioned footage was shot by free-lance cameraman Mike Hoover, who reportedly was on his way back to the United States from New Zealand Wednesday and not available to comment.

“It is the goal of CBS News in every instance to gather and report the news accurately, fairly and with integrity,” said David Burke, president of CBS News. “In the case of the Afghan war, we believe we have done so.”

Neither Dan Rather, anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News,” nor executive producer Tom Bettag was available for immediate comment on the report, which questioned the authenticity of some of the footage that it said was included on the “CBS Evening News” in 1984 and in a 1987 “CBS Reports” documentary.

In July, 1987, Rather anchored a documentary, “The Battle for Afghanistan,” that included footage shot by Hoover that previously had aired on “CBS Evening News.” At the time, CBS said that the footage in the documentary represented 18 trips that Hoover and his crew had made into Afghanistan over three years.

CBS News sources said Wednesday that Rather was very concerned about the staging allegation. “He would never stand for that,” said one source. Others at the network questioned why the report was surfacing now, more than two years after the “CBS Reports” aired.

The New York Post story, quoting sources that it said included an Afghan rebel who served as Hoover’s translator and an Afghan-British journalist who was Hoover’s second cameraman on a second project in Afghanistan, alleged that Hoover staged scenes of guerilla sabotage and edited in video footage of a Pakistani plane to make it appear to be a Soviet jet bombing Afghan villages.

Hoover, who has covered Afghanistan as a regular freelancer for CBS News for several years, has been well-regarded by the network, according to CBS News sources. In a 1987 interview with The Times, Hoover said that Rather was “really the muscle” behind his CBS assignment to cover the war.

In The Times interview, Hoover, an Academy Award-winning documentary film maker, said that he didn’t consider himself a news cameraman in the traditional sense. “I’m really kind of a film maker,” he said.