CBS: It’s more than bad PR

It’s a strange thing to say about a television network, but CBS seems to have a hard time with this whole exposure thing.

Whether it’s Janet Jackson’s breast or the debacle at “60 Minutes,” the network’s fumbling executives seem to have an irrepressible urge to say too much about too little -- and nothing of any consequence about the mess right under their noses. In fact, it is difficult to recall a crisis-beset news organization of this caliber whose managerial and journalistic stewards have failed their audience and staff quite as thoroughly as CBS’ have over the last two weeks.

Ever since “60 Minutes” aired the segment in which network anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes used a set of unauthenticated -- probably forged -- memorandums to allege irregularities in President Bush’s service with the Air National Guard, CBS has come in for a well-deserved battering.

According to sources inside “60 Minutes,” the effect on the program’s staff has been about what you’d expect -- unless you were a clueless corporate apparatchik.

“The atmosphere around here is completely toxic,” said a longtime member of the newsmagazine’s staff, who asked not to be identified. “The impact of all this is just beyond words. It’s consuming everyone’s time and focus. It’s difficult to work on stories with all this going on, though a few people are trying. Everyone feels as if they’ve personally suffered a real loss.”

Certainly, the additional revelations grudgingly offered by CBS this week will do nothing to help matters inside or outside “60 Minutes.”

In a statement released Monday -- the same day on which Rather told his viewers that using the documents was “a mistake in judgment” -- CBS gave this official account of how what the anchorman also described as “an error that was made ... in good faith” occurred: The memorandums’ source, Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, “deliberately misled the CBS News producer [Mapes] working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents’ origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source. Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point.”

In other words, neither Mapes nor Rather nor any CBS News journalist ever bothered to find and talk with the person they believed was the memorandums’ actual source. Instead, they relied entirely on the representations of a middleman, Burkett, with a public history of intense animosity toward Bush and a sense of personal grievance against the Guard so deep that he had to seek medical treatment for the depression it engendered.

Just the sort of person you’d want to take on faith.

“Everyone around here is stunned at the shoddiness of this thing,” said the “60 Minutes” veteran. “We listen to what we’re being told and read what’s being reported and we just don’t understand how this happened. It’s shocking; there’s no other word for it.”

Shocking and reckless, but the week’s other revelations were something more.

Monday, Joe Lockhart -- a senior aide to Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry -- told reporters that he had spoken by telephone with Burkett at the request of Mapes, who’d also mentioned that “60 Minutes” had a tough piece on Bush forthcoming.

Wednesday, the network described Mapes’ political matchmaking as “obviously against CBS News standards.”

Really?

Corporate reticence to discuss consequences may reflect a belated deference to prudence and fairness. Better late than never, one supposes. Or, it may signify something about the disclosure first elicited by the New York Times in an interview Monday with Rather. According to the anchorman, when he learned that Mapes had the documents, he immediately called CBS News President Andrew Heyward and asked him to personally take charge of the report’s preparation. “I have to ask you to oversee, in a hands-on way, the handling of this story,” Rather recalled asking Heyward. “He got it. He immediately agreed.”

In fact, according to the Times, Betsy West, a top Heyward deputy, “closely supervised the production from early on,” and the CBS News president personally watched the segment before it was broadcast.

With grease that thick on the rails, it’s little wonder that less than a week passed between the time Mapes obtained the dubious memorandums from Burkett and Rather went on the air with their report.

All this presumably will be fodder for the two outside investigators appointed by Heyward and Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS Television and co-president of Viacom, CBS’s corporate parent.

The word “presumably” suggests itself because the so-called panel is itself somewhat curious. Neither member has any experience with broadcast journalism.

Louis D. Boccardi is a former top executive of Associated Press and was one of the outsiders called in by the New York Times to assess the wreckage Jayson Blair left in his wake.

Boccardi, at least, is a newsman of nearly four decades’ experience. The other investigator, former U.S. Atty. Gen. Richard “Dick” Thornburgh, is a far more curious choice. He served in the Cabinets of two Republican presidents -- Richard Nixon and the elder George Bush -- but also has a history of conflict with the incumbent chief executive’s top political advisor, Karl Rove.

In 1991, Thornburgh ran unsuccessfully for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, leaving unpaid $170,000 owed to Rove’s consulting firm. Rove sued Thornburgh personally for repayment and won after a trial in Austin, Texas, that the New Yorker magazine characterized as humiliating for the former attorney general.

Thornburgh, meanwhile, is the author of a year-old memoir in which he sharply criticizes “60 Minutes,” alluding to the program’s “usual sensationalized treatment” and describing his own treatment at the newsmagazine’s hands as “shabby.”

Someone with a greater taste for complexity will have to sort out the conflicts inherent and potential in all of this.

As the experienced member of the “60 Minutes” staff put it, “We all think it’s a mistake for management to continue to treat this as a public relations problem and not a journalistic problem.”