After decades of gotcha journalism (television division), CBS (News) 60 Minutes (II) and Dan Rather have taken a well-deserved and overdue boomerang between the eyes.

As within days became legend, the over-the-hill gang at Black Rock set about to recycle charges about President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service with fresh material. So fresh, it turns out, that the effort could not withstand the first wave of scrutiny by the new media, thus promulgating the second wave by the mainstream media, which have now begun to eat their own, with good reason.

We will not regurgitate the details, for which ample and frequently updated sources exist, but ironies abound.

CBS got taken. Of that, there is no reasonable doubt. But as every student of swindle knows, marks invariably self-identify through a combination of conspicuous greed, which manifests itself in a multitude of forms, and gullibility, which really has only two forms, genetic and willing.

CBS was among the willing. It had been actively soliciting the documents it got. Once the network had them, its pre-broadcast efforts to verify authenticity did not rise above the subterranean standards of tabloid journalism or book publishers who care only that they are insulated from lawsuits.

Experts with whom CBS consulted are speaking about those discussions and are doing exactly what CBS is not — preserving their credibility and professional integrity.

Faced with an avalanche of challenges to numerous aspects of the documents, from the obvious to the arcane, Dan Rather chose to denigrate detractors, not answer questions. By that time, however, he was besieged by the herd of his own competitive colleagues, who were forced to make CBS the story, all too quickly and routinely uncovering the fraud that CBS refused to acknowledge.

On Wednesday, September 15, Rather was handed an almost miraculous, if bizarre, gift. An 86 year-old former secretary to the Texas National Guard told Rather on 60 Minutes (II) that while she believes the CBS documents are forgeries, she also believes the expressions in them to have been the sentiments of their deceased putative author, for whom she had worked and typed similar documents.

Hastily donning that flimsy new veil, CBS thus, at this writing, clings to its original story, while defensively saying it will now investigate the authenticity of the documents, the only tangible support for said story beyond the sayings of folks who are contradicted by the sayings of other folks.

It’s too late for that. CBS breached the rules of objective journalism when it failed, for whatever reasons, to adequately investigate the authenticity of the documents before airing them or warn viewers that their provenance was uncertain. That omission legitimately moved the story from the activities of the President while in the National Guard to the motives, means and methods of CBS in preparing and airing the story.

Under fire and under scrutiny, CBS resorted to the first defense of scalawags and scoundrels, the stonewall for which it has so thoroughly — and correctly — chastised so many others, live and on camera.

The body blow that CBS has now inflicted on itself and all of mainstream journalism is significant, at the very least adding momentum to the sea change in how Americans get their information and trust the sources thereof.

As the story plays out, or, as more often happens today, is displaced by another of greater titillative value, it begs serious, immediate questions.

Who faked the documents? Through whose hands did they pass on the way to CBS, with whose knowledge or direction? Did CBS have any contact with known political operatives (other than the prominent Kerry supporter interviewed on air) who had any material effect on the preparation of the story? Will CBS move as quickly and as forcefully to reveal the outcome of its investigation as it did to air its story?

Is there any chance at all that journalism — old, new, emerging — will rediscover the elegant truth and useful public service of simply answering who, what, where, when, how and why?