Rather's statement said:

"Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a '60 Minutes Wednesday' story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question—and their source—vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where—if I knew then what I know now—I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

Anticipating the statement, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wrote it would "represent a huge embarrassment for the network, which insisted for days that the documents reported by Dan Rather on '60 Minutes' are authentic."

But Kurtz said the statement would "also help defuse a crisis that has torn at the network's credibility."

The New York Times reported network officials met last night with Rather to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before deciding on any final course of action.

The admission the network was misled into putting false information on the air is a major reversal from previous statements by CBS News chief Andrew Heyward.

"We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television," Heyward said last week on the CBS Evening News. "There was a great deal of corroborating evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that's what we are doing."

As WorldNetDaily reported, CBS News stood by its claims in the face of widespread accusations that early 1970s documents used on a Sept. 8 "60 Minutes II" segment to discredit Bush are forgeries, created with a modern word-processing program.

Among the assertions "60 Minutes II" derived from the documents – four memos by Bush's late squadron commander Col. Jerry Killian – were that the commander was pressed to "sugar coat" a performance evaluation for Bush and that the future president did not follow an order to report for a physical.

According to the Times, document specialist Emily Will who inspected the memos for CBS and said she raised concerns about their authenticity, confirmed a Newsweek report that "a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail."

She reportedly declined to name the producer who told her this, but indicated the producer was in a position to know.