CBS Still Bleeding

…And It’s Going To Take More Than A Band Aid…


The trickle of personnel flowing out the door at CBS’s offices in NY City made a big splash yesterday with the announcement of the departure of Dan Rather’s boss, CBS News president Andrew Hayward.

The chairman of CBS, Leslie Moonves, announced today that he was replacing the longtime president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, with the longtime president of the network's sports division, Sean McManus.

In a conscious nod to Roone Arledge, who oversaw both the news and sports divisions at ABC for more than a decade, Mr. McManus, 50, will similarly serve in both capacities at CBS. But Mr. McManus will face challenges that simply did not exist in Mr. Arledge's time, as CBS - and other television news divisions, to say nothing of newspapers - struggle to find new ways to captivate viewers who are increasingly defecting to newer outlets like Fox News and Yahoo, and increasingly skeptical of journalists as a whole.

Take my word for it--this is a good thing.

Heyward deserved to be fired this time a year ago after the airing of the false CBS 60 Minutes story about President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service.

Buried down in the fifth paragraph is the NY Times mention of Heyward’s involvement in the failure to verify the documents supporting the TANG story.

Last fall, the news division was upended by the fallout from a report, first broadcast on the weeknight edition of "60 Minutes," that purported to present new details about the Vietnam-era National Guard service of President Bush but was later discredited after the network acknowledged it could not vouch for the documents on which it was based.

Mr. Heyward - who, at least initially, fiercely defended the report and the documents, despite fundamental questions raised immediately about their authenticity - managed to hold on to his job in the months afterward. But few others involved in the production of the report did. Dan Rather, the correspondent on the report and the anchor of the "CBS Evening News" for nearly a quarter century, stepped down as anchor in the spring, a year earlier than he had planned.

Meanwhile, after an outside panel concluded that the disputed report had been rushed onto the air under competitive pressure and never should have been broadcast, Mr. Moonves fired the segment producer, Mary Mapes, and demanded the resignations of three other top journalists, including Betsy West, a senior vice president, who was one of Mr. Heyward's chief deputies.

Of course CBS has managed to blunt the public relations impact of airing a false story about a presidential candidate a month before an election by allowing the guilty parties to trickle out the door one by one. By avoiding a single mass firing, CBS and the media can still claim that the story about Bush shirking his Viet Nam National Guard service was really true and that they just couldn’t prove it. Rather's and Heyward's departure is represented as coincidental--not punative.

Would YOU have even known about this final chapter in CBS's pennance if I hadn't pointed it out to you? Most people have forgotten about Heyward's involvment in the story by now.

So let’s summarize the casualties to date:

Dan Rather-swears he believes the story was true. Enjoying early retirement.

Mary Mapes-swears she believes the story was true. Writing a book about her adventure.

Betsy West-swears she believes the story was true. Trying to figure out what hit her.

Josh Howard-swears he believes the story was true. Trying to score with Mapes

Mary Murphy-swears she believes the story was true. Celebrating Heyward’s firing.

Andrew Heyward-buying a gun and looking for Dan Rather and Mary Mapes

I’d say that CBS has finally settled the score on this issue. Let’s just hope that they learned their lesson.

Probably not…