I think that's both unfair and inaccurate. You don't want someone to publish a story based a single anonymous source and unverified documents. That's how bogus stories about Benghazi emails or George W Bush's military record get made.
I am positive that you have the facts about George W. Bush's military record wrong.
The real story there is that all of the pertinent facts, with evidence, appeared in the BBC. Greg Palast was responsible for a lot of it. When CBS wanted to report on the story, they were given all of that, then went and did their own digging.
In the process of digging they were given a perfect memo that they ran with without authenticating properly. The memo turned out to be too good to be true, and was a forgery. The result is that everyone was left believing that the whole thing was based on a forgery.
But it wasn't. All of the key facts were uncovered earlier by the BBC and the planted forgery was merely a clever way to discredit the story. After Dan Rather painfully took a public fall over it, the issue became radioactive for all US media organizations.
