When documents become evidence

Aug 20, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

(Kaieteur News) – For two decades, Dan Rather was the face of the CBS Evening News. During that extraordinary period, he acquired a reputation as one of the world’s foremost journalists and television news anchors. He reported from some of the most consequential events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and became, for millions of Americans, a symbol of serious television journalism.

All of that came crashing down on September 8, 2004.

It was not because Rather had suddenly forgotten how to report the news. It was because CBS broadcast a story concerning then President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard based, in significant part, on documents that the network failed to authenticate properly.

The documents purported to be memoranda written in the early 1970s by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Bush’s commanding officer. They appeared to support allegations that Bush had received preferential treatment and had failed to fulfil certain military obligations. The story was explosive, particularly because it was broadcast in the middle of a fiercely contested presidential election.

But almost immediately, questions arose about the documents themselves. Critics scrutinised their typography and formatting and questioned whether they could actually have been produced in the 1970s. More damagingly, CBS could not establish a reliable chain of custody for the documents. The source who supplied them had also misled the network about their provenance.

CBS initially stood by the story. Then the defence began to unravel.

An independent investigation commissioned by CBS subsequently found serious failures in the reporting and verification process. The problem was not simply whether the documents were genuine. The more fundamental failure was that CBS had not done enough to establish that they were genuine before putting them on television as evidence.

The consequences were profound. Several CBS executives lost their positions. Rather stepped down as anchor of the CBS Evening News in 2005. His extraordinary career was permanently marked by what became known as the “Killian documents” controversy.

There is a lesson here that should be of particular importance to the Guyanese media as we examine the tragic capsizing of the M.V. Barima.

Recently, alleged reports purportedly relating to the vessel and dated last year have been published and circulated. If these documents are genuine, and if they accurately represent inspections, findings or warnings concerning the condition of the vessel, they could be extremely important to understanding what happened.

But if is the operative word.

The media has a responsibility not merely to obtain documents, but to authenticate them. Where did they originate? Who prepared them? When were they prepared? Who signed them? Were they actually issued by the institution whose name appears on them? Can the issuing authority confirm their existence? Have they been altered, edited or taken out of context? Is there a chain of custody?

These are not bureaucratic questions. They are fundamental questions of journalism.

A document does not become evidence merely because somebody sends it to a newspaper, posts it on social media or places it in a journalist’s hands. Its authenticity must be established before it is presented to the public as fact. And where authentication cannot yet be established, the public should be told precisely that.

The M.V. Barima tragedy is too serious to become an arena in which unverified documents are treated as established truth. There are grieving families and a nation seeking answers. The eventual Commission of Inquiry must determine what happened, why it happened and whether warnings were ignored. The media’s role is to illuminate that process, not prejudge it.

There is another dimension to this responsibility.

Journalists must also exercise caution when reporting allegations made by political leaders, including the Leader of the Opposition. An allegation may be newsworthy; but it may not necessarily be evidence. A journalist can report that an allegation was made without converting the allegation itself into a fact.

Two people attending the same mosque does not, by itself, establish that they are business partners. It certainly does not establish that one owns shares in a company connected to the other. Nor does familiarity prove corruption.

Otherwise, we would quickly arrive at the absurd proposition that because two people were seen together, everything one person subsequently did becomes evidence against the other.

That is not investigative journalism. That is guilt by association.

The press must be fearless, but being fearless does not mean being careless. Indeed, the more serious the allegation, the greater the obligation to verify it.

Dan Rather’s experience provides a cautionary tale: sometimes the greatest damage to journalism does not come from refusing to pursue a difficult story. It comes from pursuing it so eagerly that the discipline of verification is left behind.

In matters as grave as the loss of life aboard the M.V. Barima or corruption, getting the story first must never be more important than getting the story right.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

• documents, Evidence, journalists, Peeping Tom, television journalism

---