September 20, 2004
Blogs 1, Space Unicorns 0
Well, what's this? Who decided to stop by?
And now?
CBS News on Monday said it regretted broadcasting a story about President Bush's military service based on documents whose authenticity is in doubt, saying the source of the material had misled the network.CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, the reporter of the original story, apologized.
In a statement, CBS said former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett "has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents" and "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
The network did not say the memoranda — purportedly written by one of Mr. Bush's National Guard commanders — were forgeries. But the network did say it could not authenticate the documents and that it should not have reported them.
Glad I could help!
Okay, enough blogger triumphalizationalisticism. (For now!) So, I guess that's the end of it, right? I mean, they said they were sorry we all noticed, what more do you want. What's that? Who's the "actual source"? Oh, I'm sure it's no big deal.
Update: Bleah examines their statement in slightly more detail.
Update 2: I don't want to speak out of turn, but apparently serious questions have been raised here.
Update 3: I'm sure there are MP3s of Keystone Kops music floating around, I just don't feel like Googling them. Go find one, fire it up, and read this.