US: CBS admitted yesterday that it had been duped into running a story casting doubt on President George Bush's National Guard service which was based on documents it could not prove to be authentic.
"We should not have used them," president of CBS News Mr Andrew Heyward said. "That was a mistake, which we deeply regret." The admission is a grevious blow to the credibility of CBS News, one of America's most influential news organisations, and its 72-year-old anchorman, Dan Rather.
On September 8th, CBS's 60 Minutes displayed memos allegedly written by Mr Bush's late squadron leader, Col Jerry Killian. They said Mr Bush had refused an order to take a medical exam and that there was pressure to "sugar-coat" his record.
Almost immediately after the broadcast, document experts questioned the authenticity of the memos, saying they appeared to have been created on a computer and not a 1970s typewriter.
CBS strongly defended its broadcast, and even when a former National Guard secretary said the memos might be fake, Rather insisted no one had disputed the story's premise - that Mr Bush had pulled strings to get a National Guard assignment that kept him out of Vietnam and then failed to fulfill his service.
Rather last weekend travelled to Texas to confront the CBS source, Mr Bill Burkett, a retired Texas National Guard official, who admitted to him he deliberately misled a CBS producer, giving her a false account of their origin. He apparently got them through the post.
The CBS blunder enters the annals of major media embarrassments in the US, from the Washington Post made-up Pulitzer Prize-winning story of a drug-addicted boy 20 years ago, to the 1998 CNN retraction of a claim that the US military used nerve gas in Laos, and the New York Times admission last year that a reporter had regularly invented page one stories. The CBS debacle will undercut any further attempts by critics to raise questions about Mr Bush's service in the Texas National Guard in 1972.
Rather, who has had famous confrontions on air with President Richard Nixon and George H W Bush, will also find it more difficult to ward off charges of liberal bias often made by Republicans. Given that the story made serious charges against a president during an election campaign, Mr Rather is under pressure to resign.