I've never been able to understand CBS's willingness to stand by Dan on this. Don't the network news divisions exist only to bring prestige to the brand? Rather's news has consistently trailed the others. They've certainly had no success with morning shows. Now his actions have begun to tarnish their one success, 60 minutes. It's been obvious now for years that the guy's a kook (remember election 2000: "This race is shakier than cafeteria Jell-o; Frankly we don't know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon," etc.) You'd think they'd relish the opportunity to bring out the knives.

"CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from . . . "

Cart, meet horse.

From the Washington Post story of yesterday:
"Mary Mapes had been trying to get her hands on the rumored documents for five years."

Claiming "we was duped!" is more than a little bit disingenuous.

Mr Hill - canning Dan would amount to an admission that he's in the tank for Kerry so far that his eyebrows are dripping, because that's the only way he could have believed these memos were real.

I don't think Dan's gonna go, unless he voluntarily decides to bail before he has to announce that Bush won 50-0 on Nov 3rd.

Admitting that they took any documents from Burkett -- who has made a series of wild, changing and discredited charges against the President for years -- let alone these documents is an admission of partisanship.

Keep in mind, happy as we all are that WaPo's Kurtz and ABC are even COVERING this story, they are still covering it with kid gloves compared to how they would cover it if this were, say, the Washington Times in trouble, caught trying to bring down a Democrat president.

Look, does the average voter even know what's going on with this story, is my question to you guys.

Hearings. Now. Or we may as well be France.

George:

The voters know. CBS has become a laugh line on late night TV.

Assuming:
1) everyone at CBS is NOT an idiot
2) the docs are forgeries

the question is : why did CBS act so irrationally?

Occam's Razor speculation: someone close to the DNC got the docs to CBS ..

what other plausible explanation is there?

JonofAtlanta:

Occam's razor is nice, but for this consider Hanlon's Razor which says, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Mike - seems like stupidity and malice are running neck-and-neck in this horse race. And "contempt for voters" is coming up on the outside.

I don't buy it -- the collective intelligence at CBS MUST have understood they were in peril and then went ahead and made the situation worse by issuing those incredible inanities almost a full WEEK after the original snafu..

ordinarily, I would agree -- but not this time..

something is up that's making them act desperately..

There is no innocent explanation for taking documents from Burkett.

If they thought they could sell Ben Barnes why would they balk at selling Burkett (if they had to)..

no, I'm still thinking it came through somebody they REALLY don't want to finger..

If CBS comes out tonight and says their investigation will take eight weeks or more before a final report is released -- i.e. until after the Nov. 2 election -- then consider this a modified version of the cover-up, in which the network knows it's guilty but will try to delay the release of the information on who gave them the documents until after it could affect the election's outcome.

CBS will hope that, like the McGreevey election kerfuffle last month that has completely died down, by admitting the documents are fake the uproar here will die down, and they can weather the pressure to implicate anyone within the Texas or national Democratic Party that could damage Kerry and the party's overall image before anyone casts their ballots.

Dan has fessed up. He was misled. He wouldn't have used the docs. He wouldn't have run the story. He was abused as a child...wait a minute, that's his line on Oprah next week.

Drudge is running Dan's statement now. It doesn't have the child-abuse line. But I've got an e-mail that Dan's mom wrote at the time which admits the nastiness.

David Hill is right: when you become a Leno punchline, you've hit the national consciousness. Check out http://www.newsmax.com/liners.shtml.

Even if Dan R. has given up, Dan Schorr hasn't.

Saturday, he proposed that the documents once existed but no longer, so that someone who had valid knowledge of them reconstructed them for our benefit.

Today, he repeats that line, adding that that someone was 'clever.'

I have two questions about all this.

1. Why did CBS's document experts merely raise questions? Why didn't they recognize, right away, that they were in MSWord?

I mean, it seems to me that nowadays the default position on any questionable document would be, Is in MSWord?

2. How could CBS simultaneously think that a) it needed new documents to solidify the story if b) it already was solid?

Either it's a good story or it isn't. If it wasn't good enough earlier, fake documents didn't make the earlier evidence (whatever that was) any better.

In my news career, I've had many a story that I wanted to prove out but couldn't. I don't buy the 'hot competition forced CBS to move early' argument. When you find yourself close but not quite able to close up the argument, you slow down, you don't speed up.