Years After Cbs Scandal, Answers To Bush Questions Elusive

NEW YORK (AP) — Rushing to meet a deadline proved to be the downfall of Dan Rather and his CBS News team when their story questioning former President George W. Bush's military record collapsed in 2004, a media scandal that is the basis of the current film "Truth." Prior to CBS' report, several news organizations pursued stories about whether Bush's National Guard unit was one where elites landed to avoid being sent to the Vietnam War, and whether Bush essentially skated through his last year of service. CBS initially defended the story, then apologized when its executives realized they couldn't vouch for its accuracy, and picked an independent panel to investigate what went wrong. The panel that studied CBS' actions on the story, chaired by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, former chief executive of The Associated Press, said it could not determine whether they were real. Whether scared off by doubtful documents, dead ends or political heat applied to CBS, other news organizations rapidly lost interest in pursuing the story, said Mark Feldstein, a University of Maryland professor who is writing a book on journalism scandals, including the CBS story. The film is based on Mapes' book, advancing her belief that the documents are legitimate, and characterizes the panel looking into the story as being more interested in assessing blame than in the story itself, and protecting CBS' corporate interests. Before the CBS story aired in 2004, the "Doonesbury" comic strip offered to make a $10,000 donation to the USO in the name of anyone who could prove that Bush served out a portion of his Guard duty in the Alabama National Guard, where Bush had been briefly transferred while he worked on a Senate campaign. [...] we probably will never know what happened with George Bush's service in the National Guard.