Ernest Miller has put together a comprehensive two-part analysis of CBS’s response to criticism of the Killian memo forgeries, appropriately titled: Incompetent AND Unethical: Part One.

Making mistakes is one thing. Absurdly defending those mistakes, stonewalling and casting aspersions on those who make credible and legitimate criticism is another. When a major news organization engages in flagrant violations of basic journalistic ethics with regard to a claim that might have significant impact on a presidential election, that is an important story.

It would be absurd to expect or demand aggressive investigative reporters to always get it right the first time. Yes, we should demand high standards, but perfection is not achievable. However, we should demand vigorous correction policies. Imagine if the documents had been better forgeries. What would it have taken to get CBS News to admit error? In this case, the cover up really is much worse than the crime.

Many claim that there are other important institutional media questions, such as potential bias, news judgement and emphasis: more coverage should be devoted to other issues, news organizations need to dig deeper into these stories, be more aggressive in investigating and uncovering government untruths, and etc. Absolutely. These are important questions and they need to be addressed, but the answers aren’t simple or even readily apparent in many cases. However, if you don’t take clear violations of the fundamentals seriously, you’ll never get satisfactory answers to any of the more difficult questions.

Second, I’ll reiterate my stand that this isn’t about Dan Rather, but about CBS News. Dan Rather is important, it is clear, but he is only one link in the web of responsibility with regard to CBS News’ response to valid criticism.

Third, my basic conclusion is that the upper management of CBS News has deliberately acted unethically in responding to legitimate criticism. If the management of CBS News was not deliberately unethical, their sheer incompetence rises to the level of culpability. This is not to say that the rank and file of CBS News are implicated in the guilt of the CBS News executives, just as the rank and file of Enron are only guilty of having the poor luck in inadvertantly choosing to work for a group of crooks.