The independent panel’s report on the forged "60 Minutes" memos was just released, and it concludes that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel found that CBS compounded their error by a "rigid and blind" defense of the falsified report. In response, CBS asked three employees to resign, and terminated Mary Mapes, the producer of the "60 Minutes" segment. CBS’s story about this is here, and the full 200+ page Thornburgh-Boccardi report is available in PDF format here. As I am typing this, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard just cut to the heart of the matter on Fox News: "CBS wanted to hurt President Bush. It wasn’t that they were sloppy."