Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > ABC vs. the Washington Post on Mary Mapes Story

It's amazing to me how differently two media outlets can report the news. Case in point: ABC's and the Washington Post's articles on disgraced producer Mary Mapes, who was responsible for the now-discredited memos supposedly proving for an absolute fact that George Bush shirked his National Guard responsibilities.

ABC's Brian Ross:

She tells Ross that she had no journalistic obligation to prove the authenticity of the documents before including them in the "60 Minutes II" report. "I don't think that's the standard," she said.

In reality, CBS showed the documents to their own document examiners before they ran the story, and their own examiners told them not to trust the documents. You'll only read about that in the WaPo, where Howard Kurtz took the trouble to research the story and interview someone other than Mary Mapes:

Linda Mason, a CBS News senior vice president, said Mapes was fired because "her basic reporting was faulty. She relied on documents that could not be authenticated -- you could never authenticate a Xeroxed copy. She led others who trusted her down the wrong road." Viacom acted because its executives were "stunned at the report" and concerned about restoring CBS News's reputation, she said.

Three of CBS's own document experts say they had warned CBS they could not authenticate the memos.

ABC:

Mapes says one of her few regrets in handling the story was her phone call to a member of Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign staff prior to the broadcast. "I wish to God I hadn't done it, because I think it was so wildly misinterpreted." She says she made the call only as a way to gain favor with the source who provided her with the documents.

Mapes says she is continuing to investigate the source of the controversial documents whose authenticity was seriously questioned by the CBS panel.

But that source was an unassailable font of unbiased truth and non-craziness, right? WaPo:

Mapes's source for the documents, former National Guardsman Bill Burkett, later admitted lying about who had given him the memos said to have been written by Bush's long-dead Guard commander.

Aw, poor Mary Mapes. Her naive trust of the aged, along with her patriotic sympathy to the military, probably caused her to automaticlally trust an elderly person attached to a guard unit, right? Wrong! From the WaPo:

Mapes is dismissive of Marian Carr Knox, the 86-year-old former secretary to Bush's late squadron commander, who told Rather she believed the memos were fake but the substance of the documents was true. Mapes called her "maddening" and "a quite self-righteous typist."

Finally, here's Mary in her own words from her new book:

On Web sites such as Powerline, INDC Journal, Allahpundit, and Spacetownusa, the bravehearts of the blogging world worked anonymously in what appeared to be huge numbers, in unison, to destroy the Bush-Guard story, to uphold one another's wild and hateful claims, to outshout, outargue, and outblog anyone who dared to disagree.

All those bloggers were anonymous? Only if you believe Mapes. The WaPo's Kurtz tells the whole story:

"I was attacked, Dan was attacked, CBS was attacked 24 hours a day by people who hid behind screen names," Mapes said. "I may be a flawed journalist, but I put my name on things." Some of the key bloggers, however, posted criticism under their own names.

To which Bill at INDC Journal adds:

Even in forced retirement, Mapes continues her legacy of accuracy, as neither Powerline, nor Spacetown, nor INDC Journal worked anonymously during the scandal. I invite everyone to revisit my September archives and peruse the "wild and hateful claims" made by INDC. Good times.

And though I was a minor player, I also was not anonymous in my criticism of the CBS documents.

Yours truly,
Les "that's my real name, don't wear it out" Jones
Self-righteous Typist