I want to do something a little bit different today for Al's Morning Meeting. I will be back to the story tips format tomorrow. (
For those who need enterprise ideas before then, check our archive.)
Today, I am going to spend the space in this column looking at some of the revealing information in the Independent Review Panel's report on what went wrong with the September 8, 2004, "60 Minutes Wednesday" report.
I wrote an overview of the panel's findings minutes after the report was released. Be sure you read a statement that Mary Mapes's attorney sent to me Monday night. Here is the PDF.
Now I want to go deeper into some of the journalistic process questions that every newsroom should learn from and talk about.
The questions about authentication
The investigation into what went wrong at CBS' "60 Minutes Wednesday" paints a portrait of an intensely competitive producer who feared being scooped. In response to the report, Mapes said, "It is noteworthy that the panel did not conclude these documents are false. Indeed, in the end, all the panel did conclude was that there were many red flags that counseled against going to air quickly. I never had control of the timing of any airing of a '60 Minutes' segment; that has always been a decision made by my superiors."
The report portrays top CBS executives as being out of the loop, unquestioning, and misled, which resulted in a "widespread breakdown of fundamental processes" at the broadcast.
The investigative panel peeled back the process of how CBS producer Mary Mapes got her hands on the documents at the center of the controversy. The chronology shows that the source of the memos, Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, wanted help contacting the Kerry campaign and was possibly interested in a book deal. He also had an anti-Bush political agenda that CBS had reported on months before, but that was unknown to "60 Minutes Wednesday" supervisors.
Starting on page 59 of the report, the Review Panel lays out what became CBS' "10 days of courting" of Lt. Col. Burkett, who claimed he had documents about President George Bush's service record. On Sept. 2, the producer received the first documents on which the story was based.
The investigation said Mapes and her associate producer were in a "frenetic effort to crash the Segment which would air only six days later." (page 8)
The report points out that neither Mapes nor her associate producer, Yvonne Miller, had any prior experience in document or handwriting analysis or in the mechanics of document authentication. As the investigative panel pointed out, it is "generally agreed that authentication of a document is best done with the original, so that a chemical analysis of the ink and paper, as well as a close review of any signature and the typography, can be conducted. In addition, document examiners typically reach their conclusions with varying degrees of certainty. A common finding is that the document in question does not have any indication that it is not authentic."
The panel report continued:
"Given the tight deadline, Miller did not have sufficient time to learn the fundamentals of document authentication. Had she known the basics, she would have realized that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to authenticate the Killian documents because they were copies, the alleged author was dead and no person could be located who was alleged to have been present when the documents were prepared. She instead called various people who she believed had experience in the document and handwriting field to identify potential examiners with requisite expertise. After approximately six hours of work on Friday, September 3, Miller had found four examiners who seemed to have expertise in document and handwriting authentication and who were willing to work over the Labor Day weekend."
The Review Panel said that four examiners initially were provided with the two documents obtained from Lt. Col. Burkett. The four examiners also were provided with 17 other pages of documents from Bush's Texas Air National Guard records that were known to be real since they were obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests.
Two of the examiners told the Panel that they informed Mapes and Miller that they had various concerns about the documents. All four of the examiners told the Panel that they informed Mapes and Miller that they could not authenticate the documents, primarily because they were copies.
Rather himself had told Mapes he wanted four experts to verify the documents (see page 103 of the report). Howard and Murphy and CBS lawyers told the Panel they believed all four experts had verified the documents (see page 123 and Page 132 of the report).
After the story aired, CBS insisted that the documents had been "thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts." But when bloggers called the documents into question, CBS scrambled to find experts to authenticate the papers.
How did the vetting break down?
Why didn't somebody within CBS catch the problems with the story, especially given that there are at least five layers of review that a story like this one might undergo? (See page 48 of the report for more on the review process.)
The Panel Report says the story script was not prepared until "late Tuesday night" before the Wednesday broadcast in which it aired (see page 104 of the report).
Under that time pressure and with concerns that other media organizations were on the trail of the story, the panel found that the vetting system broke down.
In fact, the Review Panel said the vetters knew virtually nothing about the person who was thought to be the original source of the documents (see page 14 of the report). Mapes, the report said, didn't tell anybody about the controversy surrounding her source's (Lt. Col. Bill Burkett's) background (see page 51 of the report).
Burkett, it turned out, had been a Bush and National Guard critic. But to her bosses, Mapes described him as "solid," "credible," and "without bias." Interestingly, on page 66 of the report, CBS White House correspondent John Roberts -- who had interviewed Burkett in February -- described Burkett as "unreliable," but did not know about Mapes' ongoing investigation (page 65 of the report).
The Review Panel report said: "The September 8 segment should have received the highest degree of vetting because, among other reasons, the segment:
"1. Was a major investigative piece that was produced in a very short period of time;
"2. Was pursued intermittently for over five years, which could cause the correspondent and producer to become too personally invested in the story;
"3. Was to be released in the middle of a presidential campaign and was highly negative to one candidate (President Bush);
"4. Involved a source who did not want his identity disclosed;
"5. Involved a second source who had never been located by '60 Minutes Wednesday';
"6. Relied on documents that could not be verified by their purported author because he was deceased;
"7. Relied on documents that were not originals; and
"8. Was the first original story aired under the direction of the new '60 Minutes Wednesday' management team."
Why did CBS stand by the story for 12 days?
The report offers an analysis of how CBS attempted to prove its flawed story to be right, rather than investigate an avalanche of problems with the piece.
"Friday, September 10, should have been a watershed day in dealing with the growing controversy about the Segment.
"First, CBS News President Heyward, concerned about mainstream media's increasingly critical reporting about the segment, directed Betsy West early that morning to investigate the details of the examiners' opinions and confidential sources that allegedly supported the segment. No such investigation was done at that time. Had this directive been followed promptly, the Panel does not believe that '60 Minutes Wednesday' would have publicly defended the segment for another 10 days.
"Second, during the day, three events took place that should have alerted CBS News management that the reporting for the segment may have been flawed. First, the CBS News strategy to get '60 Minutes Wednesday''s document examiners to defend the segment was not followed, as only (handwriting analyst Marcel) Matley made an appearance. As noted above, Matley did not attest to the authenticity of the documents.
"A respected typewriter expert, Peter Tytell, contacted (associate producer Yvonne) Miller and ('60 Minutes Wednesday' executive producer Josh) Howard and explained in detail why he believed the Killian documents were likely fakes. His views were not pursued or analyzed, in part, because '60 Minutes Wednesday' was searching only for experts who would defend the September 8 Segment.
"Third, Major General Hodges contacted Mapes and Rather and told them that Mapes had misquoted him about his alleged confirmation of the Killian documents and now that he had had the opportunity to review them, he believed that the documents were not authentic. Neither Mapes nor Rather asked Major General Hodges to explain why he believed the documents were not authentic and the Panel finds no discussion of this conversation with others at CBS News at the time."
The long entrenched and eventually failed attempt to defend the story lead to the Panel's recommendation that, in the future, stories that were called into question should be investigated by people other than those who created the report.
Contact with the Kerry Campaign
The Panel Report looked into whether the story was part of a political agenda on Mapes's or CBS's part. Specifically, the panel investigated the circumstances surrounding Mapes's Sept. 4 contact with Joe Lockhart, a senior staff member for the John Kerry campaign. The investigation revealed that before Lt. Col. Burkett turned over the documents, he wanted an assurances that he would somehow be put in contact with somebody inside the Kerry campaign.
The panel described the contact this way:
"Mapes told the Panel that before Lieutenant Colonel Burkett turned over any of the documents, he had pressed her to arrange for him to be put in touch with someone from the Kerry presidential campaign so that he could provide the campaign with strategic advice on how to rebut the attacks by the 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' group. Mapes told the Panel that she did not know anyone from the Kerry campaign, but got Lockhart's telephone number from Chad Clanton, a Kerry campaign official who had been quoted by Mapes' husband, a newspaper reporter, in an article on an unrelated matter.
"Mapes also told the Panel that before calling Lockhart, she discussed this request with Howard and that he approved the contact. Mapes said that Howard had reasoned that reporters exchange information from various sources and this request was not problematic. Howard, however, told the Panel a very different version of this conversation and said that he clearly informed Mapes that it would be inappropriate to intervene with Lockhart or anyone else associated with the Kerry campaign on Lieutenant Colonel Burkett's behalf.
"Mapes further told the Panel that at some point prior to Sept. 8 she spoke to Lockhart. According to Mapes, Lockhart called her and the conversation lasted approximately two minutes. Mapes told the Panel that she merely informed Lockhart that Lieutenant Colonel Burkett wanted to speak with him."
But the panel says that Lockhart's version of the story is different. Lockhart said he was reluctant to speak with Mapes because he didn't want to give the impression to anybody that the Kerry campaign was assisting CBS.
The Review Panel found "certain actions that could support" charges of political motivations fueling the '60 Minutes Wednesday' report. But the panel said it "cannot conclude that a political agenda at '60 Minutes Wednesday' drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content."
You can read more on the "political connections" part of the report starting on page 221.
Out of Context
One of the Review Panel's recommendations is that, in the future, whomever has script approval duty for any story must understand the context of a soundbite that is used. The supervisor should not only understand the context but understand what was "left out" of the story. That recommendation flows out of how some who were interviewed by CBS said they were characterized in the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story.
On pages 100-101 of the report, one of the handwriting experts said he was portrayed as being confident that the documents were authentic. But he said, in context, he had many reservations. Those reservations were left out of the report.
The Panel said that another person, Lieutenant Robert Strong, also was quoted out of context. Strong was an administrative officer of the Texas National Guard (TexANG) and added a soundbite to the story that the documents were compatible with how business was conducted at the time Bush was in the service. But, the panel says that Mapes lead Strong to believe that four experts were in the process of authenticating the documents" (see page 21 of the report). Strong complained to the panel that CBS should have included his caveat that he had no personal knowledge about whether the documents were authentic.
What about other CBS programs?
The Panel did not look at other "60 Minutes" segments to see if they suffered from similar oversight meltdowns, but it found no evidence that there are such examples either. "More than a few of the staff members interviewed by the Panel likened this breakdown in the production of the Sept. 8 segment to a 'perfect storm' in which a confluence of factors came together and led to the failures (see page 28 of the report).
The Panel said CBS did not control or influence the scope of the investigation and did not have any influence or input with respect to the findings of the Panel.
