Yes, but you also need to understand that this is a statement "by the President of CBS News, Andrew Heyward.
This is not a statement by the President of CBS Corportion, nor is it a statement by a corporate officer of ViaCom.
This carefully parsed statement is the basis for which executive careers are ruined. Mr. Andrew Heyward has danced not only himself, but many underneath him and possibly some above him in the ViaComp Corporate chain of command into harm's way.
Someone in the chain of command needed to exert leadership to try to stop the attacks on the good name of ViaCom and its subsidiaries. Mr. Heyward has the opportunity to solve a public relations problem or make it worse.
Considering what most news organizations are saying and based on all the good work done by FREEPERS, this story isn't going to go away until a story is told that passes the dumb test. Mr. Heyward has an opportunity to craft that story.
If we pars the really critical words we find "...we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that's what we are doing."
My read of this is someone explained the obvious as to what should be done. Mr. Heyward like a good corporate soldier is going to do what should be done, but isn't very happy about it.
I see two critical questions:
(1)How much time has CBS News been given to solve the problem
(2)Will those doing the internal investigation for Mr Heyward have an independent perspective or will they have a "siege mentality."
Probably a lot of jobs over at CBS News hang in the balance of answering these two questions.
Now from a sociological experiment point of view, I am willing to bet that the other "journalists" will smell blood and soon we will see a journalistic feeding frenzy of ABC, NBC, FOX, CNN, NYT, NY POST, LA TIMEs, TIME, NEWSWEEK, etc. "redouble their efforts to cast doubts on both the CBS "documents" and the facts undlying the story." Personally, I really like what the Dallas paper has done.
If I were to bet, I would wager that Mr. Heyward either doesn't "get it" or wants to protect his staff. From a corporate management damage control perspective, he should not have defended the underlying story in his statement. An announcement of "We forged the documents so we could present the truth," will cause a pretty huge staff turn over at CBS News.
This is no longer about the "truth of the story," this is now about the reputation of the CBS Network and ViaCom. CBS News is expendable.
I think that Dan is toast and that folks over at 60 Minutes, the DNC, CBS News are all debating about cutting their losses.
And here's a theory as to why, which ties into 2 other facts.
1) Rather won't retire until spring, until after the Pres. election
2)He's been working on this story for 5 years.
3) In other words, use it now, or never. He's been saving the Mother of All Scoops and can't stand to see it go to waste, so he fudged the verification.