The Narnia 3 Blog

This is Research?

The recent CBS-Dan Rather-Fake Memos scandal is perhaps the most embarassing episode for a major news organization since a major newspaper declared that Thomas Dewey had defeated Harry Truman in the 1948 presidental election. By every account the documents that were provided to CBS were questioned almost immediately by the experts they contacted, there were points of inconsistency almost beyond belief (mainly that one of the key figures had left the Texas Air National Guard over a year prior to his trying to manipulate the records of President Bush). There is also now the fact that the director of the 60 Minutes II program, Mary Mapes, facilitated a meeting between their main "source" and a leading democratic operative working in the Kerry campaign.

In one of the texts I use at the Seminary, The Craft of Research, the authors talk about "Research and Ethics" and on p. 255 they make the statement that, "Responsible researchers do not submit data who accuracy they have reason to question." Now CBS has finally admitted that the documents were fakes. They even have done an interview with their source and he admits misleading CBS. But this is a pretty thin veil for Dan and Company to try and hide behind. There was every reason to question the accuracy of their story and the sources behind it.

Of course, Dan and Company, as all journalists and even pseudo-journalists will do, will hide behind "protecting sources" and will likely not reveal what ought to be revealed, an exacting time line of their research process, who provided what information to whom, and what exactly was the method of verification or falsification used by CBS. Their story was a fraud and there should be no "protection" afforded to anyone, source or otherwise, in this debacle.

In this story there are only three possible scenarios: (1) Dan and Company were completely snookered, which means they are blithering incompetents; (2)Dan and Company "allowed" themselves to be used by people with a political agenda that they pretty much agreed with and would have willingly hid behind the mask of "journalism" to perpatrate a fraud on their viewers to help a cause, in which case they should make a new motto, "The Ethics of Relativity Rules the News," or (3) Dan and Company knew full well what was going on, and actually worked with the democratic party and Kerry operatives to foist their fraud upon their viewers, in which case they are little more than the "reporters on the payroll" like the old days of political bossess and the machine politics that real journalists help bring down in the 1920's and 30's.

The only way for CBS to demonstrate that they are serious about this is that "heads should roll" starting with Dan Rather followed my Mary Mapes and then Andrew Heyward, the head of CBS news. Will journalistic ethics bring about this remedy? Probably not, but the corporate fallout, loss of viewership, and the subsequent loss of revenue from advertising probably will. There is something to hold CBS News accountable, even if they won't do it themselves.