HABIT FORMING:

Ruthless People: Rathergate Producer Mary Mapes, CBS News, and the Chicago All-Stars: Any day now, CBS News' internal Rathergate report will be read by the executive suits at CBS’ “Black Rock” fortress, and producer Mary Mapes will likely be fired. (Nicholas Stix, 14 December 2004, Intellectual Conservative)

Mary Mapes is the CBS News producer who most recently brought us the Abu Ghraib and Rathergate stories. The Abu Ghraib story presented American soldiers in charge of a section of the Abu Ghraib military detainee facility reserved for terrorists, as if they were torturers and war criminals. The story, which was reported separately by Mapes for CBS News and Sy Hersh for the New Yorker, represented in both cases an instance of defining journalistic deviance down. Hersh and Mapes both sought to recreate the scandal of Vietnam’s My Lai massacre, but without the massacre. This is what happens when journalists go from seeing themselves as patriots supporting America, as they did in World War II, to seeing themselves as revolutionaries, destroying her, as they have since the War in Vietnam. If FDR had had to put up with the likes of Mapes and Hersh, today we’d be speaking German.

In Rathergate, Mapes used forged documents in an attempt to cost George W. Bush re-election, by presenting the then-Texas Air National Guard officer as a shirker, as insubordinate, and possibly even a deserter who succeeded only through the intervention of powerful friends.

Mapes’ source for the forgeries, Bill Burkett, a former Texas Air National Guard lieutenant colonel with a longtime, public grudge against the Bushes, argued in his defense that he did not seek out Mapes; she sought him out. (Burkett has also denied that he produced the forgeries, though no one has been able to find the mystery woman that, he claims, gave them to him.) At the time, CBS claimed Mapes had been “working on” the story for five years, yet she had nothing to show for it, prior to Burkett giving her the forgeries. And in spite of CBS News’ document experts having doubts about the documents’ authenticity, Mapes rushed the story onto the air four days later. The September 19 New York Times quoted Mapes’ executive producer, Josh Howard as saying,

Mary Mapes told us her source made her completely confident about where they came from, and that they were authentic, and that made me confident...

In an earlier, pre-TV era, Mary Mapes would have been fired for even suggesting the Abu Ghraib story to a major newspaper’s editor. Prior to the War on Terror, it was unheard of to take minor excesses and seek to impugn and risk the lives of America’s soldiers, let alone to seek with a hoax to cost a wartime president the White House. And yet, prior to Rathergate, inside CBS News, Mapes was one of the division’s most respected producers.

Actually the Left accused George Bush Senior and the American military of massacring Panamanian civilians during Operation Just Cause.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 15, 2004 10:25 AM