Grave Doubts

Boy, top flight news organization like CBS takes nearly two weeks to figure out what the Blogsphere uncovered in a matter of hours:

After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from, and people at the network said it was now possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air.

But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night.

I'll believe it when I see it. By the way, here's a good overview of that Trail Of Connections between CBS and the DNC.

UPDATE: But those grave doubts aren't stopping the New York Times from hawking this line of smear: Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time, seems to want promote those “essential truths” that the memos were suppose to report. Even though its been exposed as a hoax, they have all this material they've probably had in the works for months...and they don't want all that work to go to waste. Fake but accurate, indeed.