CBS Owes Ed Bradley an Apology

After breaking the news that legendary newsman Ed Bradley had died of leukemia, CBS News officials said, and did, most of the right things. Bradley's former colleagues at CBS toasted him for being "everything you admire in a great journalist," and the network devoted an entire night of 60 Minutes to highlighting Bradley's distinguished career as a skilled storyteller. When a tribute to Bradley was held November 21 at the Riverside Church in New York City, the CBS News team, synonymous with Bradley for more than three decades, likely had a significant presence.

But CBS still owes Bradley a belated apology stemming from its shameful decision during the 2004 presidential campaign to pointedly refuse to run a factually solid story of his that chronicled how the Bush administration had misled the country into war. Specifically, the Bradley story detailed the murky circumstances surrounding bogus Nigerien documents unearthed in 2002 -- the alleged smoking gun -- that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had purchased 500 tons of so-called yellowcake uranium to build a nuclear bomb. The documents turned out to be obvious fakes, but that didn't stop the Bush administration from eagerly using them in an effort to scare Americans with doomsday talk.

• "[W]e now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." Vice President Dick Cheney, 2002.
• "We do know that he [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon." then-National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, 2002.
• "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address.

Bradley's in-depth investigation, had it aired, would have been the first by a major network news outlet to devote serious time and energy to investigating the baffling case of the forged Niger documents, which were used as a pivotal propaganda tool.

But spooked by the controversy still raging over CBS' botched 60 Minutes II report on Bush and the National Guard, the one featuring the now-infamous unauthenticated memos allegedly written by Bush's commander, CBS News president Andrew Heyward completely abdicated the network's news responsibility and announced that Bradley's hard-hitting, and previously scheduled, story would not be broadcast in 2004. "We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," a CBS spokeswoman said at the time. (In fact, it was 18 months before Bradley's report, in an altered state, was safely broadcast on 60 Minutes.)

I realize the certified corporate-media takeaway from CBS' National Guard controversy, featuring Dan Rather, is supposed to be that the network was guilty of a colossal, historic newsroom blunder that ranks as one of the real earth-shattering journalism scandals of recent decades.

But I think any journalism pro who looks at the facts objectively would conclude that CBS' weak-kneed decision to spike Bradley's story represented the real newsroom calamity; a calculated capitulation that did far more long-lasting damage to CBS' newsgathering integrity than the Guard story, which, after all, the network eventually apologized for. And it did more than that. It appointed an independent inquiry, headed by a former Republican attorney general (Richard Thornburgh), to investigate what went wrong. It fired four senior producers, it canceled 60 Minutes II altogether, and even booted Rather from the anchor chair.

Yet to this day, CBS has not apologized for its timorous Niger surrender, which smeared Bradley's good name and hard work -- after the National Guard story erupted, Heyward told Bradley his Niger report wasn't good enough to broadcast, despite the fact it had already been slotted to run. (Ironically, Bradley's Niger investigation was set to air September 8, 2004, but got bumped by the National Guard scoop.)