Forging Ahead with the '60 Minutes' Flap

By: Greg Mitchell This has got to be one of my all-time favorite headlines, posted over a New York Times article on Wednesday: "Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says."

You can't make this stuff up. Come to think of it, maybe you can.

The story, of course, focused on the typist for Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, purported author of the memos. The same sentiment resurfaced a few pages later in a Nicholas Kristof column that raised questions about the military records acquired by "60 Minutes," then warned "we shouldn't be distracted by our doubts about the CBS documents. There's no doubt that Mr. Bush benefited from favoritism."

Later on Wednesday, Andrew Heyward, head of CBS News, did the two-step himself, staunchly defending the "60 Minutes" report, then promising to vet it once again.

This climaxes a wild week of media response to the landmark (one way or the other) "60 Minutes" segment on President Bush's military service, or lack of. Until Wednesday, CBS, taking a cue from John Kerry, had adopted the rope-a-dope strategy, hoping against hope that its opponents would punch themselves out, and thus give poor Dan Rather a chance for a surprise comeback, or at least survival.

Unlike many letter writers out there, I still have an open mind on whether the documents are real, partly real, or made up out of whole cloth. One correspondent informed me that the forgery has been "universally accepted." One can easily guess the nature of that universe.

Based on the same standards, and perhaps addressing the same universe, the Republican National Committee now declares that the documents came straight from the Kerry camp. Possible ... but proven?

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if proof of fakery arrived soon. Before nearly anyone, I raised questions about leading newspapers accepting the documents at face value last Thursday. But then, the White House endorsed them too, at first.

Or maybe the story is a walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction, as Kris Kristofferson (like Killian's typist) would have it. One wag suggests that Killian left behind handwritten notes and some genius at CBS typed them up to look more official for TV. Or maybe CBS's source, or someone else, did something similar long ago, based on Killian's true feelings.

In that regard, one could only marvel, while trying to put two and two together to make four, after reading and (by necessity) re-reading the penultimate paragraph in that very same story in Wednesday's Times that inspired the wonderful "Fake But Accurate" headline.

In it, David Van Os, Texas attorney for Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer, responded to growing suspicions that his client is the source for the CBS documents. Times' reporters Maureen Balleza and Kate Zernike quoted Van Os as saying: "If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor, as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973, which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done, what difference would it make?"

Got that? Van Os later sent a letter to the Times, obtained by E&P, asking for a correction, claiming that the story did not make clear that "I absolutely do not and would not condone forgery and neither would Bill Burkett."

Then, on Thursday morning, the Washington Post broadly hinted that Burkett had faxed CBS some documents from his local Kinko's in Abilene.

So after seven days of this, with experts flip-flopping all over our news pages, canting and recanting, maybe the press should take a couple days to catch its breath, put all of its evidence in order, get rid of the incredible experts and stick to the credible ones, and then blow the doubts, or CBS, away.

We don't expect much from cable news, but hey, this is newspaperdom or, in some cases this week, newspaper dumb.