Mary Mapes

News consumers of America owe a debt of gratitude to Jonathan Klein. Really.

Yesterday, NB's Noel Sheppard noted the ignominious end of Klein's nearly six-year term as head of CNN/US.

If there is an example of anyone who has overseen a bigger audience decline and loss of competitive position and survived so long, I don't know who he or she is. Fox News, which first passed CNN in total viewers in January 2002 (interesting how this basic factoid is not at Fox's Wiki entry), now routinely trounces CNN and CNN Headline combined by a factor of 1.5 to 1 or more. On Thursday, Fox's primetime audience of 574,000 was 75% greater than the CNN pair's combined total of 329,000.

But before he arrived at CNN to do his damage, Klein inadvertently did the nation a service.

Roger Simon's Wednesday morning column ("Journolist veers out of bounds"), an item Rush brought up on his show this afternoon, may be one of the most delusional items ever written by a journalist attempting to defend his profession.

Rich Noyes at NewsBusters covered one aspect of Simon's column on Wednesday, namely the deliciously hypocritical outrage of NBC/MSNBC reporter Chuck Todd over how the Journolist scandal "has been keeping him up nights, and he's especially frustrated that 'the right' would use it as 'a sledgehammer' against everyday journalists, 'those of us who don't practice advocacy journalism.'"

I'll suggest that Simon's rendition of journalistic history is at least as offensive as Todd's reaction, in that it's laughably and obviously false on so many fronts (numbered tags are mine):

... when I became a reporter, it was almost a holy calling. (1)

On Tuesday, FNC's The O'Reilly Factor hosted FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg as the former CBS News correspondent highlighted a story recently posted on his Web site, BernardGoldberg.com, in which he complains of how little mainstream media attention was given to the fact that former President George W. Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam as part of his service in the Texas Air National Guard, but that he was turned down because other pilots were more experienced, and that CBS News producer Mary Mapes, even though she knew this part of the story before the report aired, did not include this important angle in the infamous piece by Dan Rather that used forged documents to paint Bush as trying to avoid Vietnam War service.

On his Web site, BernardGoldberg.com, Goldberg chastizes Mapes:

Mary Mapes is in gloat over-drive.  Dan Rather's erstwhile producer, the woman behind Memogate, is beside herself with joy at what she sees as the impending death of the conservative blogosphere.  

It's her expectation that Barack Obama will win the presidency that has Mapes so hopeful.  Annotated excerpts from her HuffPo column, The Monster is Dying [emphasis added]:

Best-selling author Tom Wolfe made some statements about American journalism last week that would raise a lot of eyebrows in newsrooms around the country if anyone cared to notice.

For instance, he believes "newspapers are declining rapidly," that when a television news outlet does "a big story it`s always wrong," and that Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" crew were "idiots" for airing the totally erroneous piece in August 2004 about George W. Bush and the National Guard:

They should have looked at the piece of paper. Obviously not written by a typewriter.

What follows is the relevant section of Wolfe's discussion with PBS's Charlie Rose last Wednesday (video available here, relevant section at 33:30, h/t and photo courtesy NY Post):

Rachel Sklar of The Huffington Post interviewed Dan Rather, which is not a real surprise, since she’s been supportive of his vengeful lawsuit against CBS News (and his partner in fraud Mary Mapes is a Huff-Poster). But why would she ask Rather to decry the dishonesty of the Bush administration, considering his own wallowing in falsehoods? Does the Huffington Post need to share Rather’s apparent delusion that the phony documents are real until he can be convinced otherwise? In Part II of her interview, after Rather denounced how bad economic news snuck up on us because "we were lied to and people dealt in sophistry at best and misled by big people in positions of power," the honesty question followed.

SKLAR: You mentioned people in positions of power not being forthright, or lying outright. There are so many echoes in that elsewhere, especially with respect to the Iraq war, obviously. Do you see this as a pattern of how this administration has operated?

Update: Reaction from document examiner Emily Will added at bottom of post (April 3 | 13:02 EDT)

Mary Mapes (file photo at right), the former CBS producer behind the Bush National Guard memo scandal that eventually felled Dan Rather's career has a post up at the liberal Nation magazine's Web site insisting that comparisons between Memogate and the L.A. Times falling for fake documents about Tupac Shakur's murder are "simplistic, unfounded and unfair." (h/t Patterico)

Apparently, there's a profound difference between trying to sway a presidential election with questionable documentary evidence and messing with Tupac.

Mapes defended her work in Memogate before turning, predictably, to fire on the Bush administration. Of course in doing so, Mapes, who had just finished defending her reliability as a journalist, laid out at least two commonly-repeated falsehoods propagated by the Left about the Iraq war. First, Mapes insisted that:

The greatest fraud perpetrated in modern journalistic history was the Bush Administration's linking of Iraq to September 11.

But the Bush administration never argued such a thing in the lead-up to the war. As the BBC, hardly a Bush cheerleader, rightly noted in September 2003:

Whatever Dan Rather does in his post-CBS television career, let’s hope it’s not on shows children watch. In another personality trait echoing his old historical nemesis Richard Nixon, Rather’s interview with Joe Hagan of New York magazine is loaded with expletives (undeleted). The internal CBS report on the story was "pure, unadultered [BS]." When that internal review board included former Bush attorney general Richard Thornburgh, Rather reacted: "Un-f-ing-believable!" Thornburgh was a "total ass." Rather wore a T-shirt on his last night in the anchor chair that said "F.E.A." for "F— ‘Em All." When he called his producer Mary Mapes to commiserate over the fiasco, he identified himself as "Dan Rather plus three," meaning he’d drank three bourbons. That might explain why he claimed no one at the White House denied his story.

The story’s headline is "Dan Rather’s Last Big Story Is Himself." As he described Rather’s "lower lip jutting out like an ornery fish resisting a hook," Hagan sympathetically recounted:

When the news broke that Dan Rather was suing CBS News for $70 million for somehow destroying his reputation, the most noticeable reaction came from the media establishment itself. From the first story in the New York Times, it carried a different tone between the lines of the breaking news. Rather’s former colleagues think he’s lost his marbles.

The Times story by Jacques Steinberg said Rather’s career came to an “inglorious end” and now he’s taking “vehement issue” with CBS’s soft-scrub internal investigation. Rather claimed “to be reduced to little more than a patsy” in the story, and now works for an “obscure cable channel.” The implication between the lines? Gunga Dan’s picked one battle too many.

Partners in deception, partners in denial . . .

Earlier today I noted that in her HuffPo column, ex-CBS producer Mary Mapes continues to cling to the delusion that the Memogate documents were authentic. In an inteview on "Morning Joe," Dan Rather has now made a comparable reality-defying claim.

Mika Brzezinski, who, as was repeatedly pointed out, used to work at CBS and has friends on both sides of the issue, conducted the interview. Bubbles didn't have the gumption to challenge Rather regarding the forged documents at the heart of the story. Interestingly, Rather chose to raise the issue himself, and in doing so demonstrated his tenuous grip on reality and some twisted journalistic standards.

View video here.

How can I put this nicely? Mary Mapes [file photo] has reality "issues." Three years after the Memogate producer was exposed for having perpetrated one of the worst frauds in the history of presidential-campaign journalism, she continues to paint herself as the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. And incredibly, despite a mountain of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, she clings to the notion that the blatantly forged documents at the heart of Memogate were authentic.

Mapes's meltdown-in-the-guise-of-a-column appeared in yesterday's Huffington Post. Excerpts from the metaphor-gone-wild "Courage for Dan Rather" [emphasis added]:

Appearing on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,' Disgraced former CBS producer Mary Mapes said she is “uncomfortable” watching Katie Couric anchor the network's evening news. Mapes came to this conclusion not because she is a woman as Katie would like you to believe, instead because she looks “drugged” and “kidnapped.” Video available here

.Partial transcript:

Mapes on Couric: She is "...someone who looks like they've been kidnapped and drugged and are making a hostage tape. It has nothing to do with her being a male or female, it's just not comfortable to watch."

Put aside for a minute the chuckles over a leftist magazine, dedicated to the poor of the earth and the worship of Mother Earth, holding a cruise for the rich on a big, polluting cruise ship. Guess who's coming to dinner on The Nation's Tenth Annual Seminar Cruise? Mary Mapes, touted on the Nation Cruise website as the "Peabody Award Winning Former CBS News Producer." It should read: "Phony Document Specialist/Celebrated Smearer of Bush's National Guard Record."

For those who would protest this environmental violation, the Nation Cruise website also pleads its case that "The Nation has partnered with EcoLogic to reforest an area in Guatemala recently devastated by mudslides, planting enough trees to offset the carbon emissions produced by each Nation cruise passenger on this 7-day cruise." Of course, "the cost is $11 and is strictly optional." Imagine: the cruise could cost $8600 per person, but you can't spare the carbon offset change?

There comes a point at which denial drifts into delusion, and Mary Mapes has crossed it. Incredibly, she is out with a Huffington Post piece calling the assertion of the irrefutable fact that the Rathergate documents were blatant forgeries a 'lie.'

It's one thing to say those who claim forgery haven't made their case. But to call their assertions a 'lie' is affirmatively to assert the authenticity of the Rathergate documents. Mapes thus lurches one giant step deeper into delusion.  Her accusation also shifts the burden of proof. If indeed the documents are authentic, why then: prove it, Mary.

On his new blog over at U.S. News & World Report, cranky old liberal John Mashek (who earned the C.O.L. title for dismissing MRC's DisHonors dinner as "preposterous"  a few posts back) reports from a media panel at Middle Tennessee State University. He heard one Mary Mapes, still outraged by people who would insist she should prove a story before she puts it on the air:

Mary Mapes, the CBS producer who was fired over her role in a 60 Minutes II story about George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, said profiteering had taken over at television networks at the expense of news. Mapes defended her professionalism in the controversy, indicating that a rush to run the story played a role in the errors admitted by CBS. Mapes implied that she took the fall, along with other female operatives, while the male executives at the network escaped with their jobs intact. Of course, Dan Rather, who had to humble himself for the mistake, left the network anchor chair a few months later.

I'm a little surprised that disgraced CBS producer Mary Mapes hasn't drawn a little more blogger interest for her (okay, tired and bitter) latest appearance on the Pacifica Radio show "Democracy Now." It was a two-part interview. Last Thursday, she was reliving her downfall after her Bush-bashing October Surprise as those obsessive bloggers took over: "in fact, by the time our story was off the air on the west coast, I mean, the moment it went off the air, it was -- it went nuts. From attacks on the authenticity of the documents, typeface and proportional spacing and all kinds of stuff that no sane person would obsess themselves with." Certainly, Mapes didn't obsess enough over her documents' authenticity. The first half of the interview ended with Mapes mauling Little Green Footballs as a hate site:

Via Orbusmax, some odd words from Dan Rather in the Portland Oregonian, produced from softball questions by the paper's Jonathan Nicholas.

NICHOLAS: The rise of cable and the explosion of the Internet have resulted in the Balkanization of the national conversation. Just so many voices. Many people these days actually seem to believe there's no such thing as actual news. It's all just attitude. How is this affecting our civic life?

RATHER: Call me what you want, but I firmly believe there is such a thing as news. From where I sit, too many people want to advance their own partisan agendas and cast it as "news." A surprising number of people are willing to accept it as such. Three people sitting in a room shouting at each other may be interesting, it may be entertaining, but it's not news.

Ex-CBS producer Mary Mapes still has her liberal blinders on, judging by the letter that appeared in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. Responding to an unfavorable review of her book by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, Mapes nevertheless credits Alter for being right about the anti-CBS jihad from "the right."

"A thousand times, yes! The bogus questions about typeface used to 'discredit' CBS's Bush/Guard story were a fraud, as Jonathan Alter wrote in reviewing my book, 'Truth and Duty' (Nov. 20). He's also right that the so-called independent panel was a legalistic/ corporate inquisition against the news division I love. I guarantee you that, given the chance, Dick Thornburgh, his firm's lawyers and Lou Boccardi would find even Alter's work sadly lacking. Despite the millions that CBS paid, the panel got a lot wrong and still won't answer for it, just as the president has never explained his aborted military service. CBS panicked over the blog attack and strained to appease the right, whose tactics against us were the same as with Wilson, Plame, Clarke and other administration 'critics.'

One real moment in the Bozell-Mapes interview on C-SPAN2 was when Mapes said Al Gore's Vietnam record was "a perfectly legitimate story," so Bozell asked, did you do it? "I did not." But she thinks that sometime, somewhere at CBS, somebody did it. Bozell says mmm, no. No investigative piece. You may wonder: how did CBS cover Al Gore's mysteriously brief tenure in Vietnam as a military journalist? I covered that for National Review Online last year. Paw around in Nexis, and you get next to nothing, vague mentions for a few seconds, and never any sign of curiosity about the hows and whys of young Al's machinations:

In 2000, CBS had next to zero interest in Al Gore's mysterious history during his brief service in Vietnam, including his discussions with old CBS nemesis Gen. William Westmoreland. In 1999, Newsweek's Bill Turque found a Gore friend who said Gore "met twice that spring with the former commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam to discuss Gore's options. Westmoreland guaranteed no cushy deals, according to Gore's friend, but left him with one sweeping assurance: 'I believe he will be watched,' the general said. 'He will be cared for.'" Later, Turque added: "The two met during the general's visit to [Fort] Rucker in 1970, and Gore has intimated over the years that the general encouraged him to go. According to Michael Zibart, a Nashville friend, Gore said that Westmoreland told him he 'would be making a grave error if he didn't serve in Vietnam.'"

At 8:00pm Eastern, C-SPAN2 will air an interview that the MRC's L. Brent Bozell conducted with Mary Mapes, the fired CBS News producer who was behind the story that led to last year's Memogate scandal.

Use this thread to comment on "After Words" following its broadcast.

UPDATED with video, 3am EST Sunday. Video excerpt #1 (2:39 in length): Real (4.4 MB) or Windows Media (5.2 MB). Video excerpt #2 (3:44 in length): Real (6 MB) or Windows Media (7 MB).

Reminder: The entire hour-long show will re-air twice Sunday on C-SPAN2/Book TV. By time zone: EST: 6 and 9pm; CST: 5 and 8pm; MST: 4 and 7pm; PST: 3 and 6pm.

Must see TV this weekend: The MRC's Brent Bozell talks to fired CBS News producer Mary Mapes this Saturday on C-SPAN2's "After Words."

From the C-SPAN web site:

"This week on 'After Words' journalist Mary Mapes explains her investigative story on George W. Bush's National Guard record that aired on 60 Minutes II. Her new book about the experience is titled Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power. Ms. Mapes tells her version of the controversy over the segment, and the ensuing internal investigation at CBS that led to Dan Rather's resignation as anchor of "CBS Evening News," and her own dismissal. She is interviewed by Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center."

The hour-long session, taped Thursday afternoon, airs Saturday, December 3 at 8pm EST and repeats Sunday at 6pm EST and 9pm EST on C-SPAN2. We'll have a live thread Saturday night. UPDATE, 3am EST Sunday: See this node for two video clips.

In a taped interview aired Monday night on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes, agreed that the Bush National Guard story should not have aired if the memos could not be authenticated “beyond a reasonable doubt,” revealed that the weekend Mapes and her colleagues were putting the story together “was chaos” inside the 60 Minutes offices and that Dan Rather has “acknowledged to me that he did not see the finished piece before it went on the air.” Contradicting earlier reports that he and Rather got into an argument at a urinal, Wallace maintained that “I had a pleasant, sensible discussion with Dan. I said everybody who was involved with you in this thing, everybody got fired. Why didn't you go with them?” Wallace soon resisted Bill O’Reilly’s characterization of the Memogate story as a “fiasco.”

Moving on to Iraq, Wallace contended that “Iraq is becoming a kind of Vietnam” and asserted that “we should never have gone into Iraq. We were sold a bill of goods.” Wallace, however, suggested Bush may not really have been in charge and thus may not be to blame: “Now, whether the President was sold a bill of goods or whether Dick Cheney was sitting in the chair at that time, I don't know.” (Transcript follows, as well as a look back at Wallace’s May of 2004 attack on Bush and the war.)

Comments are a wonderful thing and truly one of the best features of blogging. I say that because a particular comment on the CBS News "Public Eye" blog is worth highlighting here at NewsBusters now that axed CBS News producer Mary Mapes has come under increasing fire from her former employer. This raises a question for PE commenter "Neuro-con." (Unfortunately, CBS's software does not allow direct linking to a comment so you'll have to search or scroll a bit.)

Mapes' book was newsworthy, in that it confirmed that she has an extremely distorted notion of truth. CBS is implicated in maintaining such an individual on the payroll for 15 years.

CBS has an ethical obligation to (at least) make public a list of her previous pieces for 60 Minutes, along with transcripts.

The NY Times and The New Republic, when confronted with a pathological liar on the payroll, went back and re-reported every single one of their stories. In both cases, a pattern of behavior was revealed.

Vaughn [Ververs, PE's editor], please answer this question: Why does CBS hold itself to a much lower standard than the NYTimes or The New Republic?

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales also has a regular column in Television Week magazine, and now he's coming to the aid and support of disgraced (Shales calls her "highly respected") CBS producer Mary Mapes. The article chides CBS "uber-boss" Les Moonves for his hostility toward CBS News, since Mapes claims Moonves once "half-jokingly" said he'd like to "bomb the whole building." He brings up the George Clooney CBS-glorifying hatchet job "Good Night and Good News" to claim that maybe today, Congress will reopen the case not to investigate Joseph McCarthy, but to "lambaste 'the media' and how they covered the story." This is where it gets interesting. Shales complains about Vanity Fair being mean to Mapes:

In the New York Times Sunday book review, Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter checks out "Truth and Duty," the apologia from Mary Mapes, the disgraced former CBS News producer of "Memogate" infamy, in which she blames right-wing bloggers and everyone but herself for how her "expose" of Bush's National Guard duty blew up in the face of her network.

The liberal Alter is highly critical of Mapes and CBS, but makes a rather paranoid and over-the-top claim about "Buckhead," the Atlanta attorney who originally questioned the fake documents used by CBS's "60 Minutes II" to attack President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service record.

"Buckhead"'s posting on the right-wing FreeRepublic website began the blogosphere's speedy evisceration of the forged memos, but Alter has this novel spin: "The blogger's anonymous assertion, within hours of the broadcast, that the proportional spacing and type font of the Killian memos did not exist in those days was only one of many falsehoods spread by political hit men."

The claims that Mary Mapes is now making on her Truth and Duty book tour are as obtuse and embarrassing as those made by CBS News in the 10 days after the 60 Minutes hit job on President Bush aired back on September 8, 2004.

This morning on Fox & Friends, Mapes told co-host E.D. Hill that when she was first given the now-infamous memos, “I assumed they were forgeries,” but became convinced of their reliability by comparing them to official records and talking to others in the National Guard at the time.

Those arguments were laughable back in 2004, and only Mapes (and Dan Rather) seem in utter denial of the obvious: that they were victims of a not-very-convincing hoax.

One of the document experts CBS consulted has written a response to claims made about her by Mary Mapes in her new book. Last year CBS said that document expert Emily J. Will vouched for the authenticity of the photocopied documents.

In a point-by-point rebuttal, Will responds to passages from the fired producer's new book, Truth and Duty.

On Friday, September 3, 2004, I was closing down my office and thinking about the Labor Day Weekend ahead when the phone rang and the caller asked whether I would be willing to work over the weekend on some important, time-sensitive documents. This was the beginning of my involvement in the examination of documents in the Bush National Guard Document/Memo-Gate news story.

This week, the book "Truth and Duty" by Mary Mapes, former CBS producer, was released. The book contains several inaccuracies in the description of my participation. Because the book is a public document, I see it as my duty to publicly state the truth about what I said and did.

Asked by Bill O'Reilly Thursday night on FNC whether she's a liberal, Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired in January for her role in the forged National Guard memos and representations she made to her colleagues, first put up the usual avoidance device of a liberal -- “I'm not sure what a liberal is” -- before insisting that “like a lot of Americans, I'm all over the map.” In the taped interview, O'Reilly then pressed her: "Are you registered Democrat?" Mapes seriously responded: “I don't know." O'Reilly scoffed: "You don't know?" Mapes claimed: "I don't know if I'm independent or Democrat. I know I'm not -- in Texas, I'm not sure how I'm registered." (But apparently she's quite sure she's no Republican.) O'Reilly returned to his original interest: "So you would describe yourself politically as?" She maintained: "Oh, my goodness. I'm liberal on some things, I'm conservative on some things."

Video excerpt in Real or Windows Media. (Transcript of this exchange follows.)

Asked by Larry King Wednesday night live on CNN whether she had a personal agenda against President George W. Bush, Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired in January for her role in the forged National Guard memos and representations she made to her colleagues, shot back: "Oh my God no, no of course not.” She insisted that “Dan Rather and I did stories on Hillary Clinton, we did stories on the Clinton administration and terrorism...you question whoever is in your cross-hairs." Hillary Clinton, however, was hardly in her “cross-hairs” when she produced for Rather a 24-minute tribute to her that aired on the May 24, 1999 60 Minutes II and included such tough statements from Rather as, "once a political lightning rod, today she is political lightning" and: “The agenda she lays out seems downright old-fashioned. She sees her work as focusing on children and families..." (See more below.)

Back to CNN Wednesday night, King fretted: “Who got you? The bloggers?” Mapes said she knew of the Drudge Report, but “I really wasn't aware of these really political blogs” and so when “the next day at about 11 o'clock this stuff, this drumbeat started saying the documents were false and I was just incredulous because the White House hadn't raised it, they hadn't indicated this in any way, we didn't have any evidence of that and they went nuts." As she did on Wednesday's Good Morning America, as recounted in this NewsBusters item by Brian Boyd, Mapes maintained her stance that no one has disproved the authenticity of the memos: “Their criticisms last year really didn't reach the bar of proof at all."

Video excerpt: Real or Windows Media. (Complete transcript, of above-quoted exchange, follows.)