http://ratherbiased.com/news/content/view/682/2/
snip..background
Thus, in an e-mail sent at 4:53 a.m. on September 10 to West, Howard proposed a media strategy that would acknowledge the possibility that 60 Minutes Wednesday had been the victim of a hoax:
I wonder if it’s time for us to take the offensive and say, look, we think we’re on solid ground, but we’re not just sitting on our hands. We’re continuing to investigate, and if we were the victims of an elaborate hoax, no one would be more anxious to get to the bottom of it than CBS News.
A statement might say:
There have been allegations that the documents on which we reported were either forgeries or re-creations. Nothing we have learned over the past 48 hours leads us to believe that. We remain enormously confident in the thoroughness and accuracy of our reporting.
If indeed one or more of the documents is not authentic, it would mean that CBS News was the victim of an elaborate hoax. We have no evidence that that was the case. But we are continuing to aggressively investigate, and should we find that anyone - the Kerry campaign, the Bush campaign, or anyone else – – was responsible for circulating fraudulent documents and orchestrating a hoax, no one would be more anxious to break that story than CBS News.
The point would be to shift the conversation from CBS did something wrong, to something wrong was done to us and we’re mad as hell.
West rejected Howard’s suggestion via a return e-mail at 8:39 a.m.:
I think we need to defend ourselves specifically [and] not even concede that we think it could be a hoax.
Later on September 10, Howard would again express concerns to West, Mapes and Heyward about the Segment after speaking with Peter Tytell, an individual with extensive typewriter experience. At that time, Howard’s concerns again were not acted upon and thereafter Howard did not have a major role in the Aftermath, with West apparently taking the management lead and Mapes taking the production lead on follow-up stories that defended the Segment.
Comments
BTW, CBS could immediately solve their credibility problem by disclosing all information pertaining to the segment, including production meeting minutes and the source of the documents. There can be only one plausible explaination for their failing to do so -- the damage from failure to disclose is far LESS than the failure to disclose. This leaves them damned, IMHO.