CBS EXEC DENIES HE WAS AN FBI INFORMANT

Christopher Isham, a vice president at CBS News and its Washington bureau chief, has vehemently denied a report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) that he acted as an FBI informant during the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. Isham, who was working as a journalist for ABC at the time of the 1995 bombing, acknowledged that he may have been in contact with the FBI to verify information that he had received from Vincent Cannistraro, a former Central Intelligence Agency official. While the CPI had described Cannistraro as a “confidential source” and implied that Isham had breached journalistic ethics by revealing his name to the authorities, Cannistraro himself told today’s (Wednesday) New York Times, “I was working for ABC as a consultant. … I was not a confidential source.” Isham himself described Cannistraro as “a colleague … who had already spoken to the FBI about information he had received.” He called the accusation that he had acted as an informant “outrageous and untrue.”