Out Comes The Report, And Out Go 4 CBS Employees

The duo investigating CBS’ Memogate scandal has finally released its report and CBS has taken action.

The network has asked three senior members of its news team to resign and has fired Mary Mapes, the person who produced the Memo report. Dan Rather and Andrew Heyward seem to have come out unscathed thus far despite that they were pretty much the top of the ladder on this story and and the ultimate decision whether to run with it or not..

You can find the entire report here, along with pieces of evidence to accompany the report. You can also find it along with a pretty good summary here. It’s long and lots of folks around the blogosphere are combing through it and giving their analysis. The best thus far comes from RatherBiased. After that, if you want more, you can check out Michelle Malkin, INDCJournal, and Jim Geraghty (start right about there and read up).

Here’s my brief condensation of the findings in the report: CBS took the story from a questionable and unrelizble source and rushed it to air because those involved in “breaking” the story very much wanted the story to be true; Dan Rather lied to the American people not only about the story itself but also about the opinions of the professional fact-checkers who had been consulted before the story went to air; and CBS was slow to react when it was found that the story was false. But the report denies that CBS has any political motive whatsoever. Here’s that part, from the report:

The Panel is aware that some have ascribed political motivations to 60 Minutes Wednesday’s decision to air the September 8 Segment just two months before the presidential election, while others further found political bias in the program itself. The Panel reviewed this issue and found certain actions that could support such charges. However, the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the Segment or its content.

Well, the panel did find evidence that could support charges of a political agenda and doesn’t note any evidence that would dispel those charges. What some will say, I’m sure is that the panel, for some reason, possibly involving the the inability to reach deep into the minds of Mary Mapes and Dan Rather via psychic powers, they can’t conclude that there really was a political agenda.

As Dr. Evil would say, “Riiiiiiiiight”. This smells to me like the panel wanted to walk as close to the edge of accusation of political bias as possible, considering that they didn’t have a diary entry from Mary Mapes that said, “Today, Dan and I will break the story that will hand the election to John Kerry. Muahahahahaha!”. Barring hard evidence of an agenda, the panel seems only willing to lay as many facts out there as they could find and let us draw our own conclusions and not draw any conclusions of its own. That ought not to be a very hard thing, considering the pretty damning evidence I’ve seen in a cursory scan of the document.

I’ll have to spend some quality time with the report, which may take a day or so of close reading, before I can really give an analysis worthy of your time. I don’t want to break off a series of snap judgements and miles of text that I may have to recant later. The one thing I am very comfortable saying right now is that the report is very circumspect, on purpose.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman is doing his usual great work with snapshot analysis and a round up that will only get better as the evening goes on.