Mapes couldn't believe how fast the blogs exposed her.
O what a tangled mesh we weave
Powerline
We keep waiting for Karl Rove's minions in the media world to give us a call and offer us a book contract on the inside story of "The Sixty-First Minute." We figure he owes us after we so dutifully followed his orders and played our role in exposing the fraudulent 60 Minutes II story with which CBS sought to tip the campaign last fall.
No such luck for us. The key perpetrator of the fraud, however, has been a bit luckier. Scheduled for publication by St. Martin's Press this November 8 is Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the producer of the 60 Minutes II segment. Amazon has posted the first chapter online. The book should be the perfect companion to Joseph Wilson's The Politics of Truth for members of the alternate reality-based community (apologies to Michelle Malkin).
Mapes returns with her "senior document analyst" Marcel Matley in tow. She celebrates the broadcast of her expose of the never-before-told misconduct of the incumbent president. She's riding the wave of yet another professional triumph. Then a pall sets in:
All that changed about 11:00 a.m., when I first started hearing rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far right Web sites were saying that the documents had been forged.
I was incredulous. That couldn't be possible. Even on the morning the story aired, when we showed the president's people the memos, the White House hadn't attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president's spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.
Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators--or whatever they were--were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.
In a matter of hours she succumbs to the forces of reaction peronfied by denizens of the fever swamps like us who harbor mindless animus against CBS as a den of Communists (shouldn't that be "Commonists"?).
I'm sure we'll have much more to say about Mapes's book after we've had a chance to take a look at it in full. In the meantime, we'll be sitting by the phone awaiting Mr. Rove's call. |
