Cashing In on Rathergate
From the New York Observer comes an update on the aftermath of CBS's phony-documents scandal. Two of the three CBS executives who were asked to resign in January after the release of the report on the scandal, Mary Murphy and Betsy West, have now done so, "signing nondisclosure agreements in the process." The third exec, Josh Howard, is still holding out; as we speculated last month, a Howard wrongful-termination suit could be disastrous for CBS.
Meanwhile, Mary Mapes, the segment producer, "is preparing to shop a book proposal offering an inside account of what happened at CBS News during the memo scandal":
The book will constitute Ms. Mapes' defense against charges of journalistic misconduct. According to Wesley Neff, president of the literary and lecture agency that is representing Ms. Mapes, the producer plans to argue for the veracity of the four memos supposedly typed by President Bush's former National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, in the early 1970's. . . .
Ms. Mapes' book proposal will include 40 pages of analysis and documentation that she offered to the panel to back up the documents' authenticity. In an addendum to that material--supplied on the condition it not be directly quoted--Ms. Mapes avoids direct discussion of fonts and character spacing.
Instead, she argues that the substance of the memos meshes with Mr. Bush's known records (the panel had claimed the documents clashed) and that inconsistencies in their format could have reflected the work of different typists--as found, she argues, in some of the official records.
Moreover, Ms. Mapes adds, given that two of Mr. Killian's contemporaries said the documents fit his thoughts and actions, a forger would have had to correctly guess the mental state of a dead man.
Well, which is harder--guessing the mental state of a dead man, or generating a Microsoft Word document in 1973? In any case, it appears that the four journalists CBS decided to "hold accountable" for the National Guard fiasco, one will get a nice book advance and the other three will get paid by CBS to go away. Maybe the reason the network didn't dismiss Dan Rather is he didn't need the money. |
