MORE ON DAN RATHER AND CBS, from The Baltimore Sun:

Any news organization broadcasting or publishing potentially highly charged reports – particularly in an election year – must make sure the information is accurate and that the public understands why it can be believed, said experienced reporters.

“That’s the kind of thing that you really have to do when you have a controversial topic – endless shoe-leather [reporting],” said Donald L. Barlett, half of a prize-winning investigative reporting team for Time magazine. “That kind of work just takes a lot of time. There are no shortcuts.”

There is a particularly heavy responsibility for news organizations that rely upon anonymous sources, reporters said. Typically, any news organization that grants anonymity to a source will then go to exceptional lengths to keep that promise. “We’re going to protect our source, every way we can,” CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said yesterday.

But the genesis of the information can provide valuable clues in evaluating its worth. “If this came from somebody who was inside the Pentagon records center and said, ‘Here’s some documents,’ then it’s better than somebody who’s a partisan Democrat,” said Ross of ABC. “Your level of skepticism would rise, the more a person has to gain.”

“I’ve never thought that simply relying on a source got you off the hook for your own credibility,” said Brooks Jackson, a former investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal and CNN. Jackson now runs FactCheck.org, a Web site dedicated to reviewing claims made by politicians. . . .

Barlett of Time said yesterday that he and his partner, James B. Steele, had two rules of thumb when evaluating documents of uncertain provenance. First, he said, they consult, at minimum, three or four analysts with expertise in typewriting or handwriting. Second, they would not consider documents that were “10th generation” – that is, photocopied so many times that they could not be credibly examined.

As I noted below, even if by some miracle CBS manages to convince people that these documents aren’t frauds, its lapse in professional standards in bringing them forward without more proof of reliability is unforgivable.

Stefan Sharkansky has some observations, including this one: “This failure of credibility at CBS can only magnify doubts about the credibility of other media outlets. . . . The knives are beginning to appear.”

And the pajamas!

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty offers a righteous Fisking of Rather’s on-air defense, showing just how thin and dishonest it was.

And — speaking of magnifying doubts about credibility! — the Cincinnati Post looks absolutely clueless, publishing this editorial on the documents today that doesn’t even mention their problems. How lame is that?

UPDATE: The Cincinnati Post editorial seems to have been taken down. Hmm.