Four months and two days after the original fraudulent report aired, CBS News has finally released its report on the forged memo scandal (emphasis mine):

[The] independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.

(The full report has been released as a 234-page PDF file.)

According to the report:

While the panel found that some actions taken by CBS News encouraged such suspicions, “the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content.”

That does not dispel the possibility that a political agenda existed, just that one can’t be proven. The report continues:

The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was also faulted for calling Joe Lockhart, a senior official in the John Kerry campaign, prior to the airing of the piece, and offering to put [Bill] Burkett [the source of the memos] in touch with him. The panel called Mapes’ action a “clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias.”

In other words, it looks like political bias, but because the investigators couldn’t read Mapes’s mind, there’s no way to prove it for sure. But what other than bias could explain such blatant disregard for journalistic standards by a life-long professional who colleages say “made no secret of her liberal political beliefs”? If she wasn’t trying to help the Kerry campaign, then why did she tip them off about the story?

Considering all the evidence, it’s hard to conclude that anything other than pure political bias was at play:

• When CBS News ignored basic journalistic standards, they did so in a story that was clearly intended to be damaging to a sitting Republican president in the midst of a re-election campaign.
• The producer of the story tipped off the campaign of the challenging Democrat and offered to put them in touch with the chief accuser before the story aired. The day before CBS News ran the story, the Kerry campaign started playing up attacks on President Bush’s National Guard service. And the morning after the story aired, the Democratic Party started running its “Fortunate Son” ads that attacked President Bush using footage from the CBS story.
• For days after the story was called into question, CBS News refused to look at the evidence. Dan Rather, who once spoke at a Democratic fundraiser, dismissed the doubters of the fraudulent story as being “partisan political operatives” instead of investigating the flaws in the story he reported.

When we see such sloppy reporting at CBS News sting liberals or Democrats occasionally, then I might more willing to believe there’s no partisan bias. But such bias at CBS News has already been well-documented in the past, and the direction of the slant seems consistent.

Maybe CBS News isn’t biased. Maybe these lapses merely represent a remarkable string of coincidences. Either that, or CBS News is playing us for fools.