A Rather peculiar mess at CBS

Mistakes happen.

We know that in the newspaper business as well as anyone. Despite our best efforts, we do make mistakes from time to time, either annoying ones such as a typo in a headline or very serious ones such as identifying someone incorrectly.

Whenever the mistake is a serious one, we run a correction the next day.

We've never tried to pretend the mistake didn't happen, or said that the mistake might actually be true even though it was wrong. No one in our business could say something like that and have any credibility.

But yet, incredibly enough, that is just what Dan Rather did, and apparently to this day he just doesn't get it.

Rather was the reporter on a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story two months before the general election in which it was claimed that President Bush had gotten special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard. To many people, the story appeared to be an attempt to discredit the president, and it had memos from Bush's Guard superiors to back up the story.

Except it didn't.

The memos were fakes, and within hours of the story going on the air, it was apparent to nearly everyone except Dan Rather that CBS had been duped. At this point, a real reporter would have said, "Let's get to the bottom of this and find out the truth."

But Rather just stubbornly clung to the fake memos and reported day after day that they had been "authenticated," that they were from an "unimpeachable" source, and that even if they were somehow proven to be fakes, they still were "accurate."

In other words, Rather apparently was more interested in getting the president than in getting the truth.

Now, a special panel of independent investigators has come out with a report that lays blame for the fiasco on a number of news executives and producers. But somehow Dan Rather is still standing at CBS, even though four of his colleagues were fired or resigned.

It doesn't matter how much CBS likes Rather, or even how much the viewers like him.

The bottom line is that Rather was the front man for a huge mistake, and instead of accepting responsibility he tried to pretend it never happened. He did apologize after several weeks, but we learn from the report that he did so only because it was the right thing to do for CBS, not because it was the right thing to do.