The independent panel’s report on how “60 Minutes Wednesday” got hoaxed into bombing President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard record has made a meteor-like impact in the public prints.
Romenesko has no fewer than 16 links to various accounts and reaction stories including one where Howard Kurtz opines that “it was clearly a setback for the mainstream media against an administration that has often stiff-armed or ignored journalists.”
Perhaps more revealing is the report itself. CBS has posted it in PDF format. It can be found here.
It shows how the pressure to break the big story simply trampled basic reporting. No one at CBS stopped running long enough to find out exactly where the documents came from or even how to go about authenticating such documents.
They were burned on the basics.