Rather went on faith, not facts

Watching Dan Rather unravel over the past week has been something like watching a train wreck unfold: You know it's all going to end badly, but you just can't look away until you've seen how many cars ultimately go off the rails. Well, now we know, and there's not much left to do but wave at the caboose as it careens over the side.

A little more than a week ago, the CBS anchor presented a "60 Minutes" segment produced by Mary Mapes, alleging not only that President Bush used his family's influence to get special treatment from the Air National Guard but also that he defied an order to take a physical examination required of pilots and lost his flight status.

Over the years, there have been lots of stories about Bush's apparently fitful service with the Guard. What made this one different was its reliance on what Rather said were previously undisclosed memoranda substantiating the allegations and purportedly written at the time by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush's squadron commander, now dead. Where the alleged documents may have been all these years and who provided them to CBS remain a mystery. In less than 24 hours, questions were raised -- first on the Internet and, quickly, in the mainstream media -- about the documents' authenticity.

Since then, the "60 Minutes" segment has gone from sensational revelation to controversial report to utter debacle.

The weight of expert technical opinion is that the documents are forgeries, probably the product of a contemporary word-processing program rather than the IBM Selectric typewriters in use at the time. But there is no need to descend into an arcane discussion of how many kerns can dance on the head of a microchip to sort this out. CBS has admitted that it never has possessed or seen the originals. In other words, the credibility of its report turns on photocopies provided by an anonymous source.

No reputable document examiner will authenticate anything from a photocopy -- they simply are too easily manipulated. This is not complicated. Rather and Mapes, therefore, are in the position of having broadcast a report based on documents whose authenticity they cannot establish. It doesn't matter whether the contents are genuine or not, because nobody -- not even "60 Minutes" -- can prove it from photocopies. You do not report what you cannot prove. This, too, is not complicated.