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Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, chairmen of the independent panel investigating CBS News, talked to MSNBC's Dan Abrams about their finding of their finding of "no bias" over the reporting of CBS' Bush National Guard story. Click here to read the full report (PDF file).

Below is a transcript of their interview:

DICK THORNBURGH, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL: We didn't find any political agenda on the part of any of the people involved in this. There were a lot of other news organizations following the story. We did find, however, an insensitivity to appearances. Most of the sources for this story had a strong anti-President Bush agenda of their own. And the contact between the producer of this segment and the Kerry campaign was universally condemned within and without CBS News.

DAN ABRAMS, HOST, 'THE ABRAMS REPORT': I mean, when a producer calls up an ally of the Kerry campaign to say, “Hey, I want to put you together with someone,” how is that not political?

THORNBURGH: It was a dreadful mistake to be sure, but we didn't find that there was an intention to further the political interest of the candidate. What it really was an attempt to exert some further leverage on the source to make some documents available.

ABRAMS: You had said, “You could not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the segment of having a political bias.” Accusations aside, is it fair to say this might not have happened if the people involved had more of a conservative bend?

LOUIS BOCCARDI, FORMER ASSOCIATED PRESS CHIEF EXECUTIVE: I don't see any basis on which I could make that judgment, no. I think it's clear that they did things that could lead those who think there was a bias here to be convinced of it. But you know we didn't want to make the same mistake that the program made.

ABRAMS: How involved was Dan Rather in producing, in researching, in asking the tough questions about this piece?

BOCCARDI: Before the show aired, his involvement was minimal. He had been in a very busy 10 or 12-day period with the Republican Convention, chasing a hurricane in Florida, so he was not deeply engaged in the preparatory part of the program.

ABRAMS: We know that very often, correspondents rely on producers for a lot, but a piece this sensitive, this important, and this close to the election, was coming from the voice of Dan Rather. Should he have done more?

BOCCARDI: I think Dan Rather was doing what CBS assigned him to do, which was a convention, the hurricane, and so forth. We make a recommendation that CBS News management should look at the problem of whether correspondents have enough time to contribute their insights and their abilities and their news reporting ability to a segment, and if they can't, then that's something that needs to be addressed.

ABRAMS: If you were going to describe the single biggest journalistic problem here, what would you say that it was?

THORNBURGH: I think there are probably three different areas I would focus attention on in terms of the process shortcomings. One was the failure to authenticate the documents or to report accurately upon what the experts said. Second was to thoroughly examine the background of the principal source to see what his history was, what his biases were. And the third was the whole vetting process that was gone through by the management of the program— the failure to ask the tough questions, the follow-up questions that would bring out these shortcomings.

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Originally posted by ReeQueen:
If Dan Rather should have to recuse himself from covering anything and everything W related, because of his bias, shouldn't FoxNews abstain for the same reason?

Fair's fair, you cannot ask that one biased person stop pickin' on somebody, when an entire network deifies everything that same person does. That's what we call "hypocrisy" and it's an ugly, ugly, thing.

I'm just sayin'.


"You mean they have the internet on computers now?" Homer

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Originally posted by ReeQueen:
If Dan Rather should have to recuse himself from covering anything and everything W related, because of his bias, shouldn't FoxNews abstain for the same reason?

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Originally posted by ReeQueen:
...shouldn't FoxNews abstain for the same reason?

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Originally posted by Hero:

...his reporting was on par with the other networks...that is tilted to the left.

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Likewise FoxNews is not invalid simply because they take a similar slant in the oppisite direction...

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The problem did not arise until they failed to do what any highschool newpaper reporter does: check the facts.

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Never the less CBS news and/or its agents committed a deliberate slander on the President...

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Then when we own CBS we can make them run a new Firefly series. Moday nights...after Everybody Loves Raymond.

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
...Kerry had the most favorable coverage of any presidential candidate since 1980 with 58% favorable coverage and 42% negative. During the same time period, Bush’s coverage was only 36% favorable and 64% negative.

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Originally posted by rue:
Is this a new liberal bias that only showed up for the last election?

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Originally posted by Finn:
...the most favorable election coverage of the last seven election going to the democratic candidate...

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Originally posted by NeutrinoLad:
So I think the study he is quoting says there has been a bias in favor of the Democrats in the last 7 elections.

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From the front page of http://www.cmpa.com/ :
CBS Fails To Excape Cloud of News Bias

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Originally posted by rue:
Is this a new liberal bias that only showed up for the last election?

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Originally posted by Connorflynn:

Personally, I don't care how they spin the news. My problem lies with the fact that CBS (and I don't think they are the only ones) felt it was OK to try and outright affect the election with out and out lies.

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Originally posted by rue:
That's why it's important to get your news from many sources...

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