CAN WE GET A BIG AMEN?

Writing in Forbes.com, Dan Ackman scoffs at CBS' show trial:

If CBS's Mary Mapes and Josh Howard, two of the producers who worked on the now-infamous 60 Minutes report regarding President George W. Bush's military record should be fired, it's hard to imagine what reporter should not be.
...
But the problem is this: Whether media insiders want to admit it or not, if all reporting was held to the courtroom-high standards laid out by the results of the investigation, they might have to scrap the news altogether. Of course, the next step would be to fire a lot of other folks inside the news business and out, starting with the secretary of state. [emphasis mine]

In her defense, CBS News producer Mary Mapes said, "I am very concerned that [CBS's] actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations--ratings rather than journalism. [CBS President ] ' response to the review panel's report and the panel's assessment of the evidence it developed in its investigation combine not only to condemn me, but to put all investigative reporting in the CBS tradition at risk." That's a strong statement, but it doesn't go far enough.

Of course, the original CBS broadcast was itself ridiculous, but for reasons much more basic than the fact that some of the supporting evidence may have been inauthentic or even faked. CBS is a unit of Viacom (nyse: VIA.b - news - people ).

The basic charge against the reporters is that a segment broadcast on the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes, raising supposedly new questions about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970's, relied on documents that were not verified as authentic. The four documents, described as memorandums from the files of his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, who died in 1984, suggested that Bush, then a lieutenant, had received preferential treatment.

The story itself was old news. That Bush was in the National Guard at all was preferential treatment. But the story was worth pursuing because the documents added some new details. If the documents were not genuine, therefore, there was no real reason to air the report at all, except for the fact that equally old news about the war service of John Kerry, the Democratic nominee and Bush's proponent, was getting ample air time, even without new details.

One of the oddities of the internal investigation led by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh is that it does not even find that the documents were inauthentic. But it does say, as is well-known, that soon after the broadcast aired, members of the blogosphere, pointed out that the typography and other aspects of the documents cast them into doubt. ABC, a unit of The Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ), soon attacked the report, too.

While the Thornburgh report denounces the reporters' failures, they did make an effort to determine the reliability of the Killian memos. They hired four document examiners; they looked for independent sources who could verify the information. They asked for a comment from the White House, which did not dispute the authenticity of the documents (though it did dispute that the documents showed the president had done anything wrong). The documents came from a source, retired Texas Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, who was a Kerry supporter. But if news reporters were to exclude partisan sources, they might as well close shop altogether.

The CBS reporters believed that other news organizations were pursuing the same angle. Still they spent about two weeks on the story, a pretty long time in the news field. Still, it seems now that the documents may have not been from Killian. CBS was forced later to admit they could not be certain the documents were authentic. But the report makes no case that the error was even negligent, let alone reckless or systemic. If the reporters were too rushed, that was the nature of the business, not something unique to them.

CBS continued to back its story even after reasons for doubt emerged, insisting it was correct even in its particulars. Ultimately, CBS admitted it could not authenticate the documents, and that it should not have used them. But there was never a question about the thrust of the report, old news though it may have been. Nor is there any hint that any of the reporters knew that the documents were false.

If there was a problem, it would seem to be with CBS's self-defense, not in the initial broadcast. Even after months and with resources sufficient to draft a 220-page report, Thornburgh and a team of lawyers were not "able to conclude with absolute certainty whether the [documents] are authentic or forgeries." That being the case, how can they possibly fire a news reporter operating under extreme time pressure and institutional pressure to get a scoop, for failing to do just that. Still, "[T]he failure to obtain clear authentication of any of the [documents] from any document examiner," is the very first charge in the report.

More broadly, CBS is retroactively applying the standards of the courtroom to the newsroom. Among its more than 300 references to document authentication, the report states, "[Associate producer Yvonne] Miller did not have sufficient time to learn the fundamentals of document authentication."

Here is a news flash: Very few reporters have "sufficient time" to learn these "fundamentals." The supposed fundamentals are laid out in a seven-page appendix, which reads like a manual for trial lawyers. The plain fact is that few reporters have the time to "authenticate" documents in any systematic way--though these reporters made an honest effort.

Every reporter, for instance, will rely on statements, whether from government officials or from companies, that are not authenticated in the legal sense. Reporters rely on documents written by people they don't know all the time, and no one suggests there is something wrong with the practice. When the author of the document is dead, as was the case with the 60 Minutes report, legal authentication is often impossible, which is why lawyers have a big problem when witnesses die.

Most historical documents are not subject to formal authentication. Reporters of today's news or yesterday's events must do their best. To cite one example close at hand, I am relying on the report issued by CBS that I found on the Web, even though I never spoke to Thornburgh. I failed to authenticate. Of course, I had no reason to doubt that the document I was reading was the Thornburg Report. If a reporter has reason to believe a document has been forged, he should check it out. But the fired CBS reporters did that.

It happens daily. To cite a less trivial example, in February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made his famous speech to the U.N. about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He played audiotapes of phone conversations in which the speakers, much less the tape-recorders, were not identified; he showed photographs without saying how they were taken; he claimed sources he would not identify.

Colin Powell's speech is hardly the standard. Indeed, in the annals of sourcing and verification it ranks pretty low. But the point is that standards of proof vary with the circumstances. What qualifies as evidence in news might not qualify in law or science. But it's never fair to judge solely by the result. And there is no sense from the Thornburgh report that Mapes, Howard and company failed to meet the standard that was properly applied to them. They are fall guys.

No one should hold them--or Powell for that matter--to the standard of the courtroom, because such a standard would be impossible to meet. The CBS internal report, however, should meet that standard. But for all its lawyerly detail and apparent exactitude, it reeks of a show trial.