ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE:

CBS Rathergate Producer Mary Mapes Wins First Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy (Nicholas Stix)

Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer from 60 Minutes who gave us Rathergate, has won the first journalism award given in memory of two of the worst rogues in the history of the profession, Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair. Duranty and Blair were both reporters for the New York Times, America’s most corrupt newspaper. To borrow from NBA commissioner David Stern, on his decision to suspend Ron Artest and the other Indiana Pacers thugs in the recent “basketbrawl,” the vote “was unanimous, 1-0.”

As previously detailed, Mapes was guilty of no less than three major journalistic offenses -- her “Shot in the Dark,” Abu Ghraib, and Rathergate productions.

In "A Shot in the Dark," using a fraudulent "witness's" false testimony, Mapes sought to destroy the career of a decent, diligent Seattle policeman, and cause racial strife, by depicting the white officer as having murdered a black drug dealer. In her Abu Ghraib production, Mapes presented the sexual degradation of suspected terrorists as being on a par with the My Lai Massacre, only without the massacre. And in Rathergate, she used forged documents in an attempt to win the election for Sen. John Kerry.

Friend Stix perhaps goes too far in comparing the merely lazy Jayson Blair and partisan Mary Mapes to Duranty who happily served evil.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2005 9:05 AM