« This is Madness | Main | Fire With Fire »

You know who really ducked responsibility for Rathergate? USA Today:

In some unfinished business from the "Rathergate" scandal, we continue to come across people who don't know that USA Today ran the same virtual story as CBS News, based on the same bogus Bush National Guard documents. CBS apologized and fired four. USA Today hasn't apologized or fired anybody. It hopes the scandal will simply go away. But we won't let it.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe that the Boston Globe also had early access to the information in the story and ran cooperative print companions. Assessing whether these entities bear an equivalent burden to CBS is subjective, though they certainly failed to meet basic journalistic standards of fact-checking, probably relying on the assumption that CBS had the bases covered.

And recall that after the story broke and the documents were questioned, the Globe even tried to distort the narrative by publishing a phony headline suggesting that the documents had been verified by Dr. Philip Bouffard (quite the opposite - The Globe eventually issued a correction).

Both print outlets have essentially succeeded in slinking out the back door of Rathergate.

Posted by Bill at February 15, 2005 12:00 AM | TrackBack (1)