You say you want to be the first to "break the story" if the documents are forgeries. Has it occurred to you that perhaps that story has already been broken?Interestingly, even the L.A. Times is starting to get concerned about the state of Murrow's memory.
Two of the experts consulted by CBS warned that the documents might be fake. CBS executives complain that these dubious experts didn't make their concerns starkly enough. So, for you to doubt the authenticity of documents, it is not enough for someone to say, "They might be forgeries"; they have to say, "They might be [expletive deleted!] forgeries"?
One expert you consulted, Marcel Matley, vouched for the accuracy of the signature on one of the four documents. But in your Sept. 10 report defending yourself, you portrayed him as vouching for the authenticity of all the documents. Will you run a correction that accurately reports his views?
You haven't put on air any of the critics of the documents in your follow-up reports about the controversy related to them. Isn't that sort of one-sided reporting?
You say that CBS has been working on this story for five years. Yet the man CBS has called its "trump card" in buttressing the authenticity of the documents, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, was consulted about them only over the phone and only two days before CBS aired the report. Was there not time to consult him about this sometime during the prior four years and 363 days? [Much less Staudt --ed.]
Why are you protecting the identity of the source of the documents, since he lied to you and, by extension, the nation?
This Olympian level of stonewalling starts to suggest some interesing possibilities. Like this.
UPDATE: Bush smells blood in the water...
UPDATED AGAIN: Catch-22 journalism.
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