Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > Mary Mapes Has Learned Nothing

Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer behind the story of the fake National Guard memos, hasn't learned anything. She seems to think the conspiracy was in the debunking of the phony documents, rather than the phony documents themselves.

[Rand Simberg] ... in the case of Charles Johnson, proprieter of Little Green Footballs and web site designer, he has forgotten more about typography than Mary is ever likely to learn or (on the available evidence) be able to comprehend?

[Quoting Mapes]All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing,

[Sandberg]"Peripheral spacing"? I think that she means proportional spacing. This demonstrates again, just how little she has learned from this experience, when she doesn't even seem to possess the reasoning skills to understand the arguments against her.

Mapes is still trying to figure out time zones, too. In other words, she still hasn't digested last year's news.

Liberal blogger Kevin Drum had this to say:

I don't know what the rest of the book says, but if the first chapter of Mary Mapes's new book is any indication, she's still clinging to the notion that the infamous Killian memos that were broadcast on 60 Minutes last September are real.

[...]

This is ridiculous. Mary Mapes went to air with a story that was full of obvious holes and hadn't been checked adequately. There is tons of evidence that the memos are forged and not one single piece of evidence suggesting they're real. If Mapes is still trying to defend them, she's delusional.

And for any of the rest of you still holding out hope that just maybe the memos are real after all, let me put it this way: the evidence that they're genuine is about equivalent to the evidence that Intelligent Design is a better theory than evolution. If you're part of the reality based community, it's time to face the facts on this.