Funny, but the last time CBS' "60 Minutes" broadcast an unsubstantiated, ultimately discredited story embarrassing to the president of the United States, there was no investigation and nobody got fired.
Well, let me amend that. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated star witness Kathleen Willey's allegations against Bill Clinton to a fare-thee-well before concluding what any halfway skeptical reporter would have suspected from the first: that she was an unreliable, self-dramatizing person with a habit of embroidering her own history.
Even that great American Linda Tripp told Starr's investigators that Willey, whose 1998 interview accusing Clinton of "groping" her in the Oval Office turned the pretty Richmond widow into a celebrity, was closer to being a presidential stalker. That Willey was not exactly an innocent flower would have been clear to anybody who ran a simple Nexis search, as my occasional writing partner Joe Conason and I did the morning after her dramatic one-on-one interview with CBS' Ed Bradley.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch had printed many stories about her late husband Ed Willey Jr.'s alleged embezzlement, his suicide and the complicated web of lawsuits in which she had become enmeshed. Those stories featured competing versions of the truth and numerous intriguing subplots.
In short, Willey was at least as shaky a source as Bill Burkett, the retired Texas Air National Guard officer who leaked the now infamous memos to "60 Minutes" supposedly documenting President Bush's dereliction of duty in 1972. Even if it took Starr two immunity grants and a failed criminal prosecution to admit (in a final report) that Willey was a bad witness, CBS should have been leery of her from the start.
So why didn't "60 Minutes" pay the price for its credulousness about Willey? Well, the answer sure ain't "liberal media bias." Even after prosecutors concluded that Willey had lied under oath, TV talk shows kept booking her to trash Clinton. She became a star.
That's also true of the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Careful reporting by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Chicago Tribune documented that their attacks on Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam record were provably false in every important respect. Yet they kept showing up on TV.
Embarrass somebody named Bush, however, and the rules suddenly become very stringent. A former Republican attorney general is hired to conduct an investigation.
Which is not to say the four dismissed CBS employees involved in "The Case of the Dicey Documents" didn't get exactly what they deserved. They did. Had anchorman Dan Rather not decided to retire, he might have been shown the door as well, although his worst sin appears to have been unwarranted trust in star producer Mary Mapes, whose zeal for a story that turned out to be too good to be true drove her down the road to ruin.
Worse, the report says Mapes' account of CBS' decision-making as it rushed to get the ill-fated program on the air was inconsistent in crucial respects with everybody else's. That's intolerable.
"If your mother says she loves you," runs a journalistic proverb, "check it out." Me, I prefer the unofficial motto of my native New Jersey: "Oh, yeah, who says?"
Amazingly, the CBS team reporting on the president's lost year in the National Guard --and do let's recall that the suspect memos made a neat fit with other signs that Bush took a powder--never talked to the purported source of the documents even after Burkett changed his story about who it was.
That's incredible to me.
Or might be had Conason and I not documented even worse transgressions in our book, "The Hunting of the President."
During the infamous Whitewater scandals, reporters pursuing Clinton credited the "revelations" of paid sources; edited audio tapes and video clips to make innocent remarks appear suspect; routinely hid exculpatory evidence (my favorite was a Washington Post article neglecting to mention that Clinton never endorsed a supposedly suspicious check); intervened with the Justice Department on behalf of an embezzler under indictment; actively assisted prosecutors trying to flip witnesses against the president; hyped stories about nonexistent FBI testimony alleging that the Clintons got $50,000 from a crooked loan; and even gathered information from sources and turned it over to Starr's prosecutors.
Those should have been firing offenses, too. But that was then; this is now. That was Clinton; this is Bush. Last week, columnist and TV pundit Armstrong Williams got caught violating the most basic rule of all: He took $240,000 from the White House for touting its education reforms. There was a signed contract; he fulfilled it. Even Pravda did things more subtly.
According to David Corn in The Nation, Armstrong told him that everybody does it. If so, the coming months could prove very enlightening.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@cs.com.