Exhaustive, independent and thorough though it may be, CBS' official report on what went wrong in Dan Rather's now-infamous "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment on President Bush's Air National Guard service has one thing in common with that original broadcast.
Just as Rather and his colleagues were unable to prove their allegations that official favoritism allowed Bush to avoid fulfilling his military obligations, so the network's outside investigators were unable to satisfactorily answer the scandal's central question: What part, if any, did political bias play in this debacle?
Of all the questions facing the independent investigators -- former Republican U.S. Atty. Gen. Richard L. Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, retired chief executive of Associated Press -- none was more difficult, nor more crucial than this. The allegation that CBS News' conduct in this matter was not merely incompetent but also motivated by politics is the crux of the issue.
It is what ignited the rhetorical firestorm that drove Rather into early retirement and, Monday, forced the network to discharge not only Mary Mapes, who produced the segment, but also Betsy West, senior vice president; Josh Howard, executive producer of "60 Minutes Wednesday"; and Mary Murphy, his top deputy.
Unfortunately, while the 224-page Thornburgh-Boccardi report meticulously documents the details of what already is known -- that CBS ignored the basic journalistic practices and its own policies to rush the segment onto the air -- it adds little of value to our understanding of whether political bias was at work at any level of the process.
The 5 1/2 pages the investigators devoted to the question are contained in Section X: "Whether There Was a Political Agenda Driving the September 8 Segment."
In it, the authors acknowledge that "the question of whether a political agenda played any role in the airing of the segment is one of the most subjective, and most difficult, that the panel has sought to answer.... The panel does not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the segment of having a political bias. The panel does note, however, that on such a politically charged story, coming in the midst of a presidential campaign in which military service records had become an issue, there was a need for meticulous care to avoid any suggestion of an agenda at work. The panel does not believe that the appropriate level of care to avoid the appearance of political motivation was used in connection with this story."
