That sounds like a lawyered up position. If they admit the documents are fraudulent, it could open them up to exposing their sources and possible legal consequences.
They're still at it. Check this out!
CBS Uses Phony Documents to Promote Draft Hoax
RatherBiased.com ^ | September 28, 2004
Posted on 09/28/2004 9:11:30 PM CDT by RatherBiased.com
Daniel Irvin Rather must be a masochist. You'd think that in the midst of the terrible publicity he is currently getting for working closely with a partisan Democrat bent on bringing down President Bush that Dan Rather would have the good sense to lay off the liberal bias for a while. But common sense seems to be in short supply at CBS News these days.
Three weeks after he denounced the internet as being "filled with rumors," the embattled CBS anchor ran a story on his Tuesday "Evening News" program hoping to stir up fear of an impending military draft.
In a story that was a textbook example of slipshod reporting, CBS reporter Richard Schlesinger used debunked internet hoax emails and an unlabeled interest group member to scare elderly "Evening" viewers into believing that the U.S. government is poised to resume the draft.
At the center of Schlesinger's piece was a woman named Beverly Cocco, a Philadelphia woman who is "sick to my stomach" that her two sons might be drafted. In his report, Schlesinger claimed that Cocco was a Republican and portrayed her as an apolitical (even Republican) mom worried about the future.
Schlesinger did not disclose that Cocco is a chapter president of an advocacy group called People Against the Draft (PAD) which, in addition to opposing any federal proscription, seeks to establish a "peaceful, rational foreign policy" by bringing all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Like Schlesinger's Cocco, the group portrays itself as "nonpartisan"although its leadership seems to be entirely bereft of any Republicans.
The group's domain is registered to a man named Jacob Levich, a left-wing activist who in a 2001 essay compared the Bush Administration to the totalitarian government portrayed in George Orwell's 1984.
PAD also lists Anita Dutt, a Green Party activist who is also a member of an anti-war group called Bronx Action for Justice and Peace. In a March 3, 2003 New York Times profile of the group reprinted on the organization's web site, Heidi Hynes, one of its leaders, said of her fellow members that "none of us are Republicans."
Also left out of the CBS story was the fact that while there are two bills in Congress that are seeking to reestablish the draft, both of them (S-89 and HR-163) are sponsored exclusively by Democrats and have been pronounced DOA by the Republican leadership.
Much more on this to come but in the mean time, click read more to see the transcript or watch the clip by clicking on the picture to the right.
That sounds like a lawyered up position. If they admit the documents are fraudulent, it could open them up to exposing their sources and possible legal consequences.
I think the statement is a lame attempt at face saving and preservation of market share. Legally, the statement is neutral to them. "Based on what we know now .." implies that they learned something material after airing, that would have kept them from airing. But that is untenable. CBS had the same information, different only as a matter of degree between the time they aired the story and ten days later. For example, the number of experts asserting "inauthentic," the number of detail points to support that assertion; and adding Staudt to the voice of the Killians. In other words, CBS couldn't prove the documents were authentic THEN, and they knew it THEN.
That should be one of the conclusions of the investigation, but I doubt it will be. For defamation, the legal issue isn't as much the authenticity of the documents as it is whether the underlying assertions (got favors, avoided a medical exam because he had something to hide) were broadcast while knowing them to be false.
Agreed that connections to the DNC/Kerry campaign are potential legal hot water, although I haven't found a statute or rule that says so. The Federal Election statutes imply an unquestioned assumption. That assumption is that news media is independent, and equally adversarial to all political parties. The law does not appear to contemplate the possibility that a political party would work hand-in-glove with a news media outlet.
People active in liberal partisan politics enjoy a revolving door between political service and media employment. See Stepanopholous, Carville, Begala, Lockhart and others. Add to that the cozy and chummy personal relationships, and it's no wonder the liberal agenda is pushed by what is effectively a liberal propaganda machine that spans print and broadcast news media outlets. Having undeniable evidence of this go public is something CBS fears deeply. But it is too late. The revelation is underway via talk radio and the internet.