Another Update: Check it out. Someone’s blogging under “myopic zeal” already. 
Heads rolled! These are what the consequences of sloppy journalism should be. In a failed attempt to smear George Bush, four employees at CBS were FIRED over their role in Rathergate:
The action was prompted by the report of an independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated.
The correspondent on the story, CBS News anchor Dan Rather, is stepping down as anchor of CBS Evening News.
“We deeply regret the disservice this flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday report did to the American public, which has a right to count on CBS News for fairness and accuracy,” said CBS President Leslie Moonves. (My emphasis)
Here’s a PDF of the 234-page report (HTML via Wizbang). I’ll have more to say on this later. Right now I’m raking Bush over the coals for violating the prohibition against “covert propaganda.” After I’m done, Dan Rather will be raked.
I’ll use this opportunity to promote my recent National Review Online article, “The Blogosphere’s Smaller Stars.”
Stay tuned…
Unrelated link: Joe Carter on “Breaking out of the Evangelical Ghetto.”
More Rathergate report blogging: Wizbang, Hugh Hewitt, Ratherbiased.com , Rathergate.com, VodkaPundit, Discarded Lies (Charles of Little Green Footballs), Power Line, Patterico, Pejmanesque, Michelle Malkin (several posts), Captain’s Quarters (and here), Blogs for Bush, INDC Journal, Politburo Diktat, PoliPundit, The Moderate Voice, The Sundries Shack, Michael King, Democracy Project (and here)…
Hey, this is what bloggers do!
Power Line’s John Hinderacker will be interviewed on CBS tonight.
Update (1/11): The best commentary on Rathergate?
PoliPundit has a couple of good follow-up posts on the report here and here.
Also see Captain’s Quarters on the Washington Post’s and Weekly Standard’s assessment of the report.
Leave it to bloggers to make information easier to access. Kevin at Wizbang has created a paginated web version of the 234-page report. Read the report. I plan to read it and blog about it, and I’ll be very “intolerant” of commenters who haven’t. 
More from INDC Journal.
Captain Ed: “Needless to say, there are many more instances of carelessness, prevarications, and corner-cutting in this report. But the substantial representation made by the Thornburgh-Boccardi report demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that CBS allowed Mapes to run wild with this story, that it followed none of its own internal checks and balances, and that CBS management simply allowed Mapes to put whatever she wanted on the air. It is impossible to imagine that CBS would have done anything like this on a story about John Kerry or anyone else other than George Bush.”
Power Line in still picking apart that report.
