Killian documents controversy
[9] CBS News producer Mary Mapes obtained the copied documents from Burkett, a former officer in the Texas Army National Guard, while pursuing a story about the George W. Bush military service controversy.
In the 60 Minutes segment, Rather stated that the documents "were taken from Lieutenant Colonel Killian's personal files",[10] and he falsely asserted that they had been authenticated by experts retained by CBS.
[11] The authenticity of the documents was challenged within minutes[12] on Internet forums and blogs, with questions initially focused on anachronisms in the format and typography, and the scandal quickly spread to the mass media.
[13] CBS and Rather defended the authenticity and usage of the documents for two weeks, but other news organizations continued to scrutinize the evidence, and USA Today obtained an independent analysis from outside experts.
[16] CBS fired producer Mapes, requested resignations from several senior news executives, and apologized to viewers by saying that there were "substantial questions regarding the authenticity of the Killian documents".
The story of the controversy was dramatized in the 2015 film Truth starring Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, directed by James Vanderbilt.
[17] The memos, allegedly written in 1972 and 1973, were obtained by CBS News producer Mary Mapes and freelance journalist Michael Smith, from Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, a former US Army National Guard officer.
At that time, Burkett told Mapes that they were copies of originals that had been obtained from Killian's personal files via Chief Warrant Officer George Conn, another former member of the TexANG.
[28] Mapes informed Rather of the progress of the story, which was being targeted to air on September 8 along with footage of an interview with Ben Barnes, a former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, who would publicly state for the first time his opinion that Bush had received preferential treatment to get into the National Guard.
Lockhart subsequently stated he was "wary" of contact with Mapes at this stage, because if the story were true, his involvement might undermine its credibility, and if it were false, "he did not want to be associated with it".
On September 5, CBS interviewed Killian's friend Robert Strong, who ran the Texas Air National Guard administrative office.
[41] On September 6, CBS interviewed General Robert "Bobby" Hodges, a former officer at the Texas Air National Guard and Killian's immediate superior at the time.
General Hodges later asserted to the investigatory panel that he told Mapes that Killian had never, to his knowledge, ordered anyone to take a physical and that he had never been pressured regarding Lieutenant Bush, as the documents alleged.
"[55] The segment introduced Lieutenant Robert Strong's interview, describing him as a "friend of Killian" (without noting he had not worked in the same location and without mentioning he had left the TexANG prior to the dates on the memos).
[58] The initial analysis appeared in posts by "Buckhead", a username of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta attorney who had worked for conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, and who had helped draft the petition to the Arkansas Supreme Court for the disbarment of President Bill Clinton.
"[61] By the following day, questions about the authenticity of the documents were being publicized by the Drudge Report, which linked to the analysis at the Powerline blog in the mid-afternoon,[62] and the story was covered on the website of the magazine The Weekly Standard[63][64] and broke into mass media outlets, including the Associated Press and the major television news networks.
[65] By the afternoon of September 9, Charles Foster Johnson of Little Green Footballs had posted his attempt to recreate one of the documents using Microsoft Word with the default settings.
[67] Thirteen days after this controversy had emerged the national newspaper USA Today published a timeline of events surrounding the CBS story.
[68] In an interview with Fox News, Gary Killian expressed doubts about the documents' authenticity on the basis of his father's positive view of Bush.
[74] The first newspaper articles questioning the documents appeared on September 10 in The Washington Post,[72] The New York Times[75] and in USA Today via the Associated Press.
However, CBS's Josh Howard spoke at length by telephone with typewriter expert Peter Tytell and later told the panel that the discussion was "an 'unsettling event' that shook his belief in the authenticity of the documents".
"[49] In response, 60 Minutes Wednesday released a statement suggesting that Will and James had "misrepresented" their role in the authentication of the documents and had played only a small part in the process.
"[98][99] The New York Times' headline report on this interview, including the phrase "Fake but Accurate", created an immediate backlash from critics of CBS's broadcast.
Press Secretary Scott McClellan stated that the memos had been provided to them by CBS in the days prior to the report and that, "We had every reason to believe that they were authentic at that time.
[112] On January 5, 2005, the Report of the Independent Review Panel on the September 8, 2004, 60 Minutes Wednesday segment "For the Record Concerning President Bush's Air National Guard Service" was released.
"[120] As of September 2007, Mapes continued to defend the authenticity of the documents: "the far right blogosphere bully boys ... screamed objections that ultimately proved to have no basis in fact.
[123] On September 19, 2007, Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS and its former corporate parent, Viacom, claiming they had made him a "scapegoat" over the controversy caused by the 2004 60 Minutes Wednesday report that featured the Killian documents.
[130] The Thornburgh–Boccardi report found that Mapes' contact with Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart was "highly inappropriate", and that it "crossed the line as, at a minimum, it gave the appearance of a political bias and could have been perceived as a news organizations' assisting a campaign as opposed to reporting on a story";[114] however, the Panel did not "find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias".
The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, suggested that the memos might have originated with long-time Bush strategist Karl Rove.
[136][137] At a community forum in Utica, New York in 2005, U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) pointed out that the controversy served Rove's objectives: "Once they did that, then it undermined everything else about Bush's draft dodging.
