A "Mickey Mouse" Cover Up?

The following news item pretty much came and went in the business section of today’s New York Times…

ABC News said yesterday that it had ended an investigation into a consultant whom it fired for falsifying his résumé and concluded that the reporting he had contributed to the network was sound.

In response to the incident, ABC will make changes to its system of hiring consultants, reviewing claims of prior employment and academic credentials more thoroughly, David L. Westin, the president of ABC News, wrote in a memorandum yesterday. Also, the network’s news practices unit will be involved in all hiring decisions and reporting situations involving consultants, he wrote.

One would wonder why this unit was not involved in such decisions in the first place.

The Times story deals with Alexis Debat, a terrorism analyst who had been on the payroll of ABC as a consultant since 2001, according to the Times.

Call me just another filthy, unkempt liberal blogger, but I think this sort of blanket absolution by the Disney (owned) Network is just a little phony, particularly given the extent to which Debat (as a former French defense official who now works for the Nixon Center, which has more than just a little to do with beating the media drum for hostilities with Iran, reported thoroughly by Will Bunch here) has generated stories that dovetail nicely with the neocons’ dream of a brand new war to be fought by anyone except themselves.

As Bunch also notes, Debat supposedly hired an intermediary to conduct an interview with Dem presidential candidate Barack Obama, in which Obama supposedly stated that Iraq was “already a defeat for America” (patently untrue). Also, in a second update, Bunch notes that, in addition to Obama…

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have added their names to the list of people who say they were the subjects of fake interviews published in a French foreign affairs journal under the name of (Debat), a former ABC News consultant.

And given all of this, David L. Westin of ABC can summarily pronounce all of Debat’s network reporting as “sound”?

Assuming you could consider any reporting sound from a network that brought us this exercise in fiction (which a certain B. Tierney of a certain Philadelphia daily newspaper endorsed wholeheartedly, let’s not forget), I think this hurts even more seriously the credibility of Walt’s TV channel. And no amount of pixie dust can be sprinkled over it to put things right again.