You want fries with that crow, CBS?

From June 17, 2003:

CBS News yesterday responded aggressively to the Times story; it played the Jayson Blair card:

"Unlike the New York Times' own ethical problems, there is no question about the accuracy or integrity of CBS News' reporting," it said by way of opening its lengthy statement addressing yesterday's front-page article. The reference, of course, is to the New York Times reporter who was booted for fabricating some stories and plagiarizing others. The careers of the paper's executive editor, Howell Raines, and managing editor, Gerald Boyd, were caught in the downward flush of Blair's.

From April 3, 2004:

As Jane Kirtley says, news organizations have historically been loath to bring cases against former reporters. The fear being that such a case would open the organization's editorial practices to public scrutiny. What's more, Lynne Bernabei, Kelley's lawyer, told the Daily News that she isn't worried about any legal trouble from the government. She's probably right not to be. If what happened with Jayson Blair is any indication, the government seems similarly disinclined to prosecute fraudulent journalists.

Someday, this may change. As further fraud is exposed, experts say, the law may be forced to deal with the issue more aggressively. "Up until recently, most journalists weren't in the business of defrauding their employers and their readers," says Kirtley. This area of the law is "very much in development." And it is developing quickly.

From July 20, 2004, assertions that Bush should be held accountable for believing forgeries:

Wilson's work was thrown into the stew. The CIA continued to disseminate a report noting that a foreign intelligence service had told U.S. intelligence that Niger had agreed to supply Iraq with hundreds of tons of uranium. And in the National Intelligence Estimate produced in October 2002, the intelligence community reported that Iraq had been trying to strike a uranium deal with Niger in 2001. But the NIE noted that INR strongly disagreed with this assessment. And when the National Security Council drafted a speech for Bush in October 2002 the CIA recommended the address not include the Niger allegation because it was "debatable" whether the yellowcake could be obtained from Niger. In a follow-up fax to the NSC, the CIA said "the evidence is weak" and "the procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory." Still, in late January 2003 -- after the INR's Iraq analyst had concluded that papers recently obtained by U.S. intelligence related to the supposed Iraqi-Niger uranium deal were "clearly a forgery" -- Bush went ahead and accused Iraq of seeking uranium in Africa.