The devastating report of the outside investigation into CBS News’s myriad mistakes in its September 2004 “60 Minutes Wednesday” broadcast about President Bush’s National Guard service may have cost four CBS News journalists their jobs yesterday. But, stunningly, it somehow maneuvered its two biggest targets, CBS News anchorman Dan Rather and CBS News president Andrew Heyward, to safety despite their leadership roles in the debacle.

Careful readers of the 224-page document, written by Richard Thornburgh, a former U.S. attorney general, and Louis Boccardi, former chief executive of the Associated Press, will note numerous significant lapses in judgment by both Messrs. Heyward and Rather – and wonder how it was possible for CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves to ignore their culpability in a scandal that has cost the careers of four esteemed journalists who weren’t questioned aggressively enough by either in the scandal’s immediate aftermath.

The panel’s report chose to capitalize the word “Aftermath,” reminding readers that it wasn’t just the story’s preparation that warranted scrutiny but also the news division’s 12 days of pathetic efforts to spin its shaky journalism in the face of mounting attack. In reading the report, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Mr. Moonves has chosen to sacrifice the most obvious sinners while straining to protect Mr. Heyward’s reputation and Mr. Rather’s legacy. But both men should have resigned in the wake of the “60 Minutes Wednesday” story and this report.

Instead, we are supposed to accept Mr. Moonves’s contention, in his statement that accompanied the report’s release yesterday, that Mr. Heyward deserves to keep his job because “he issued direct instructions to investigate the sourcing of the story” and “pressed for his staff to come up with new and substantive information.” But the report itself makes clear that Mr. Heyward (who personally screened the piece in advance of air) wrote his first significant questioning e-mail after watching a “Good Morning America” discussion between George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson almost 36 hours after the story aired. Is that supposed to be leadership?

Even Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York Times, moved faster than that in launching an investigation into the actions of his lying reporter, Jayson Blair, after they were first publicly reported in the Washington Post. And soon after his newspaper’s publication of its reporting into Mr. Blair’s wrongdoing, Mr. Raines resigned.

The decision to sack Mr. Heyward’s deputy, Betsy West, for (among other flagrant mistakes) failing to follow her boss’s directive was appropriate; her email directive on September 10 to Josh Howard, executive producer of “60 Minutes Wednesday,” that the network should “not even concede that we think it could be a hoax,” reflects her depressingly corporate stance. More unfortunate were the dismissals of the supremely talented Mr. Howard and his deputy, Mary Murphy, for helping to rush the story on the air despite significant reporting holes. Mr. Howard and Ms. Murphy should have asked more questions, and raised more doubts, in advance; the faith they showed in their reporter may have demonstrated commendable loyalty, but it proved to be their downfall as well. No one will quibble with the termination of producer Mary Mapes, who comes off in the report as an overzealous, unscrupulous, and dishonest journalist who cared more about her reputation than the truth.

But how does Mr. Heyward, the man in charge of the entire operation, escape the hatchet? And how does Mr. Rather, the story’s on-air reporter – who, the commission reports, fought pressure to deliver the half-hearted on-air apology he eventually gave for the story on September 20 – avoid culpability for his egregious lack of involvement in the story he presented? According to the commission, Mr. Rather never even saw the story before it aired. And Mr. Heyward continued to approve of CBS News’s faulty follow-ups to the original story, even as he asked questions behind the scenes. In the days after Mr. Heyward’s tough missive to Ms. West on September 10, which pushed for a an aggressive in-house investigation, the report mentions no further follow-ups from Mr. Heyward inquiring about her progress.

Indeed, the only executive at CBS who relentlessly pushed Ms. Mapes to substantiate her reporting seems to have been its chief spinmeister; the report quotes liberally from e-mails sent by Gil Schwartz, the network’s executive vice president for communications, including one to Mr. Heyward five days after the piece aired, under the subject line “Total Red Alert”: “Our entire reputation as a news division now rests on our fielding a couple of experts on our side TODAY,” Mr. Schwartz wrote. Why wasn’t Mr. Heyward writing tough e-mails like that? While the corporation’s chief flack was hammering away at Ms. Mapes about her sources, the president of CBS News seemed to be doing little else but counseling caution, and allowing Ms. Mapes – the very producer whose work was under attack – to keep covering her own story for the evening newscast, in retrospect an almost-unthinkable scenario.

It’s likely that Mr. Moonves is shopping right now for a successor to Mr. Heyward, and that the decision not to remove him immediately was simply a pragmatic administrative move designed to keep some stability at a news division rocked by crisis. And he would presumably argue that Mr. Rather has already paid enough of a price by leaving his anchor chair this March, well ahead of the schedule he might have designed for himself before this scandal broke. The resignations of two such prominent executives would have seemed a devastating blow to CBS News, once considered the gold standard of network news. But it’s impossible to read yesterday’s report without feeling that had Mr. Heyward or Mr. Rather functioned as their job descriptions demanded – as aggressive, tough leaders with an unwavering commitment to accuracy – the crisis that cost four good journalists their jobs yesterday might never have happened. For that leadership failure, Messrs. Heyward and Rather bear full responsibility.

Mr. Blum is the Sun’s television critic and the author of “Tick…Tick…Tick… The Long Life & Turbulent Times of 60 Minutes” (HarperCollins).