You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos

HeadlineSep 20, 2004

The * New York Times* and the * Washington Post* are reporting that CBS News will likely admit today that it was deceived about the origins of recently unearthed memos concerning President Bush’s National Guard service. 60 Minutes host Dan Rather and others at the network reportedly still believe that the sentiment in the memos was accurate, but that the documents’ authenticity are now in grave doubt. A Washington Post investigation found that there was doubt within CBS News about the memos even before the original program aired. However the station decided to go ahead with the story after the White House didn’t challenge their authenticity. “60 Minutes” executive Josh Howard told the Post, * “we completely abandoned the process of authenticating the documents.* Obviously, looking back on it, that was a mistake. We stopped questioning ourselves. I suppose you could say we let our guard down.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top