PRESTOPUNDIT

When CBS took a corporate look at the disaster, it hired a law firm. Why? Not to determine the truth or falsehood of the reporting, but to rather to evaluate the procedures by which it was carried out, as lead attorney Michael J. Missal, at the Kirkpatrick and Lockhart firm, recently clarified for me. But the Tiffany Network didn’t even trust its own news division sufficiently to let it dig out the story.

Worse still, as former New York Times general counsel and vice-chairman James C. Goodale shows in a stunning article in the current New York Review of Books, the "60 Minutes Wednesday" journalists and producers being grilled were only allowed to make initial statements to the attorneys hired by CBS. They were never given a chance to rebut evidence against them. In effect they were sentenced without a chance to respond to what to them was secret evidence CBS attorneys developed in their investigation. What CBS produced showed neither the sound practice of journalism nor legal investigation.

CBS at least took the trouble to create an elaborate illusion of a deliberative evaluation. And it concluded from the Richard Thornburgh- Louis Boccardi report that a few firings and careful adherence in the future to its own standards and practices was all that was required.