And then there was one. Betsy West, one of three CBS employees asked to resign after Memogate, now has done so, according to New York Times media reporter Jacques Steinberg. This leaves Josh Howard as the sole remaining holdout.

CBS announced West’s resignation late yesterday, the same day that Mary Murphy released a similar statement. All three had retained legal counsel, according to various news reports.

A second journalist who had been involved in the broadcast, Betsy West, a senior vice president of the news division, also submitted her resignation this week, a CBS official said last night. The official, who had been briefed on the matter, insisted on anonymity because it concerned an employee’s contract.

Howard may not go quietly into the night. If you read the New York Observer, which does an outstanding job covering New York media, it sounds like Howard is suing to restore a reputation that he alleges the report unfairly shattered.

West and Murphy undoubtedly were bought off. Steinberg had earlier reported that CBS offered them a severance of less than a year’s salary, which is a paltry sum, to say the least for the long-time CBS veterans. The standard payoff for contract employees is a month’s pay for each year on the job.

West and Murphy must have received a significant amount of hush money to resign. We likely will never know, since such payoffs almost always come with provisions forbidding the former employee from talking about it. Also, let’s face it — the two will never work in big-city journalism again. If anything, the best they could do is a small-town news operation that would pay a fraction of what they made in Manhattan.

I’ll be watching what Howard does. You can’t buy a reputation.