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"Won't Fly"
Sept. 21, 2004...
CBS arranged meeting
for Burkett with Kerry Campaign
USA Today reports [LINK] that CBS arranged a meeting between ‘Bush is a Hitler’ Bill Burkett and a top aide to John Kerry – Joe Lockhart. Lockhart is the former press secretary of Bill Clinton. In fact, Burkett’s condition for turning over the memo documents was that CBS arrange a meeting for him with the Kerry Campaign. CBS producer Mary Mapes complied and called Lockhart, who then met with Burkett:
Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a producer talked to him about the 60 Minutes program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guard officer who gave CBS the documents. Lockhart couldn't recall the producer's name. But CBS said Monday night that it would examine the role of producer Mary Mapes in passing the name to Lockhart.
Burkett told USA TODAY that he had agreed to turn over the documents to CBS if the network would arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign.
So, how much trouble is CBS in? Potentially, a lot. The arranged meeting by a national news organization between a known anti-Bush operative and a high ranking Kerry campaign official (Lockhart) shows the ethics of CBS are not what they tout.
The network's effort to place Burkett in contact with a top Democratic official raises ethical questions about CBS' handling of material potentially damaging to the Republican president in the midst of an election. This "poses a real danger to the potential credibility ... of a news organization," said Aly Colón, a news ethicist at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
The White House said CBS' contact with Lockhart was inappropriate. "The fact that CBS News would coordinate with the most senior levels of Sen. Kerry's campaign to attack the president is a stunning and deeply troubling revelation," said Dan Bartlett, White House communications director.
