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:
"Little Green Footballs, and I was just noticing Little Green Footballs is apparently a favorite today on this broadcast, because one of your previous guests had mentioned racist -- what he felt were racist postings. I was shocked at some of the postings on Little Green Footballs. Little Green Footballs is a very, very proactive, I think far right -- You know, I grew up on a farm with a lot of conservatives around me, and -- good people who would never talk and attack this way. And I thought the attacks were vicious and pointed and sexist and..." Pacifica ended the interview there.
Mapes was referring to some guy from Empirenotes.org insisting about LGF: "They regularly print racist stuff, they regularly refer to all Muslims as 'Koranimals.' Extremely racist term."
By last Friday, she'd returned to the same old line that the bloggers, not CBS, were full of baloney: "they were citing really obscure type-face issues that I think really confused most Americans as being proof that they were forged. They were also, by the way, totally and completely wrong. One of the things I did in the book was continue to research and find examples from within the National Guard archives in Texas that showed all the typeface issues and proportional spacing and all this stuff that they accused us of having overlooked, those examples were all in place in the archives. So their complaints were complete BS."
Mapes said her role was to be rude and obnoxious: "I grew up believing that as a journalist it was my job to rock the boat. And the moment I stepped into the boat, I wanted to rock it. And that's what we're supposed to do. Journalists are not supposed to be lapdogs, we're supposed to be watchdogs. We're supposed to be inappropriate guests at the public dinner parties. We're supposed to be people who ask rude questions, because we're there on behalf of Americans, all Americans. And we're supposed to behave that way."
Too bad CBS and "60 Minutes" never had a minute to rock John Kerry's swift boat.
