Monday, Jan. 10, 2005 10:55 a.m. EST
CBS Fires Four 'Rathergate' Employees

Four CBS News employees have been ousted in connection with CBS's
flawed, inaccurate "September surprise" story questioning George W.
Bush's National Guard service.

The departing CBS staffers include Senior Vice President Betsy West;
"60 Minutes/Wednesday" Executive Producer Josh Howard and his deputy,
Mary Murphy, all three of whom were asked to resign, press reports said
Monday morning.

Mary Mapes, the producer of the segment on George W. Bush's National
Guard service, was fired. Equally as important as who was fired is who
was not fired: CBS News President Andrew Heyward will remain in his
job, something that will upset people who believe that Heyward is a key
player in CBS's allegedly biased reporting.

Dan Rather, who reported the Bush-bashing piece, is retiring in March.

The independent panel asked to investigate the "60 Minutes Wednesday"
report said that CBS, in its "myopic zeal" to be first with the story,
sacrificed accuracy and did not meet CBS's internal standards.

"The combination of a new '60 Minutes Wednesday' management team, great
deference given to a highly respected producer and the network's news
anchor, competitive pressures, and a zealous belief in the truth of the
segment seem to have led many to disregard some fundamental
journalistic principles," the report concluded.

The timing of the story - coming as it did on Sept. 8, about two months
before the November election - and the questionable source of the story
(it was based on faked documents) further damaged the credibility of
CBS News and led to charges of political bias.

On Sept. 20, CBS News finally admitted it had been "misled" by the
story's main source - former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett, who
opposed the re-election of President Bush. CBS said it could not prove
that documents Burkett provided were authentic - weeks after many
Americans judged those documents to be fraudulent, based on their
modern typeface and format.

"We should not have used them," Andrew Heyward said in the Sept. 20
statement. "That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."

In a separate statement on Sept. 20, CBS News anchor Dan Rather finally
admitted that he no longer had confidence in the documents on which his
report was based. "I find we have been misled on the key question of
how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers,"
Rather said.

"That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in
public and in the press, leads me to a point where -- if I knew then
what I know now -- I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was
aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question,"
he said.

"But we did use the documents," Rather said. "We made a mistake in
judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made,
however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS
News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism."
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