A few of the many highlights from Rabinowitz’s column today:

She fillets the anchorman for trying to whitewash "how it happened that he and Ms. Mapes had conceived such bottomless trust in the good faith and objectivity of their source, Bill Burkett, a Texan well known for the depths of his active hatred for George W. Bush and the Bush family, as well as a rage at the National Guard for allegedly depriving him of medical benefits."

And: "A producer who has worked and waited five years, building a new version of an old charge about George W. Bush's National Guard service, and who stood teetering at the brink of consummation – a chance to deliver the bullet just weeks before the election – isn't going to be inhibited by any such guff about standards."

And then there’s this:

For all its shocks, an air of inevitability hung over every aspect of this story, especially its unraveling, foreseeable from the beginning – the smell of death was in the air from the first "we-stand-by-our-story." Another aspect of the inevitable has arrived the past two days – to wit, pronouncements from experts on the media, and other philosophers, about the need for all journalists to look into their own hearts and take heed of the warning signals raised by this affair, and about how, as Marvin Kalb for one has said, this reflects on all of us.

Really? Is there no calumny, no display of overweaning pride, reason abandoned, or plain stupidity that will finally seem too much to embrace as something that reflects on all journalists? True, there's every reason to take lessons from travesties like a journalist's fabricated stories and the editorial failures that enabled them to see print. But in the CBS case we are in another realm – one that doesn't have much to do with a lying journalist. Diane Sawyer appeared on the Larry King show Wednesday to say, among other things, that the "60 Minutes" report only underscored the need to make sure investigative reporters check and recheck every fact. Well and good. But the CBS case is not about careless errors or lazy editing. It's about the blind determination to run with the story, about a violation of every journalistic caution to get the hit on the air, all followed by an aggressive institutional defense carried on at fantastic length. It is about a report that sent a great and famous American institution careening toward the edge of a cliff, while everybody asked why – why were they holding on to this story? A question yet to be answered.

We shall predict what the irrepressible Rather and Mapes will have as their final lines of dialogue in the last episode of Viacom’s low-rated farce "I Detest Dan”:

"Waaaaaaaaaah! Waaaaaaaaaah!”

Editor's note: