BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Now we'll have a look at "CNN 20" on this Monday morning.</s>ANNOUNCER: Bringing you the world for 20 years, this is CNN.</s>CARL ROCHELLE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I remember very well being called and told that the U.S. Navy had shot down an Iranian F-14, an Iranian warplane. I scrambled down to the Pentagon. And this is one of the prime examples that people who work around the news business very often use the expression that "first reports are often wrong." I was able, through sources, to learn that the Vincennes had, in fact, taken on what they believed to be an Iranian F-14. It wasn't long before one of my sources came to me and said, you know that F-14 that we shot down? He said, well, you might want to soften up your reporting a little bit. I said, what? You mean they really did shoot down an airliner? And he said, yes. There were a lot of rationalizations later on about how it happened, but clearly they made a mistake in this and they owned up to it. The explanation of it was that the person who was operating the radar, was operating a device that was supposed to track aircraft, had not moved his little cursor or tracker ball from the F-14 on the ground to the aircraft that was in the air. So he was actually looking at the wrong airplane. And they saw the airplane coming in at a high rate of speed toward them and they rationalized that it was on an attack mode.
CNN 20: U.S. Navy Shoots Down Iranian Airliner, July 3, 1988