CBS News Chief Issues Gag Order Over Afghan Tape

In a move that is unusual for a news-gathering organization, CBS News employees are under instructions from CBS News President David Burke not to discuss with the press the controversy over whether a free-lance cameraman faked footage in the network’s award-winning coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

CBS News executives are looking into the allegations and plan to meet this week with the cameraman, Michael Hoover, to go over the questioned footage, according to sources. Hoover reportedly was on assignment in New Zealand when the charges broke last week in The New York Post.

But beyond stating that CBS stands behind its coverage of the Afghan war, Burke has asked everyone involved, including anchorman Dan Rather, not to comment until CBS can complete its own inquiry.

CBS has been contacting sources involved in the story to create a point-by-point analysis of the allegations, which go back to the mid-1980s. It is unclear whether CBS intends to publish that analysis.

The current stance--which is consistent with Burke’s policy since taking over the news division a year ago--is frustrating to those within CBS News who want the network to respond more aggressively to the charges in the Post, a tabloid newspaper that has been running detailed allegations regarding the CBS coverage along with front-page photos lambasting “Silent Dan” Rather.

“This is a very important issue that questions the credibility of CBS News,” said one producer. “We should not just stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away.”

CBS executives have said that they do not want to lend credence to the charges in the Post, a newspaper not known in recent years for investigative journalism. But, countered Jerry Nachman, the new editor at the Post, “When a tabloid runs 50 inches of cold, gray type, it’s been vetted seriously. Why am I defending a piece attacking someone else’s journalism?”

The Post charged last week that CBS had aired faked battle footage and false news accounts of the war in Afghanistan in the mid-’80s. The footage aired on “The CBS Evening News” and later in a 1987 “CBS Reports” documentary, “The Battle for Afghanistan.” Most of the questioned footage was shot by Hoover, a documentary film maker who covered the war in Afghanistan as a regular free-lancer for CBS for several years.

The Post said its sources 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.

According to Lawrence K. Grossman, the former president of NBC News, and “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw, NBC wanted to use Hoover in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s but decided against it. “We wanted to make a deal but only if we could send somebody in with him,” Brokaw said. “The deal fell apart because we didn’t have the money.”

Although Hoover went over his material with producers at CBS News, he was essentially shooting alone in remote areas of Afghanistan over several years. Given those conditions, network sources said that it would be difficult for CBS to verify independently the absolute truth of everything depicted in Hoover’s footage.

With an appetite for video from remote places in an era of financial cutbacks at the networks, Grossman noted that “important news is breaking where networks don’t have representatives. Increasingly, you have a world that’s filled with people who have video cameras. You check (free-lancers) out thoroughly, but you can never have absolute certainty unless you have one of your own people there.”