Posted on 09/21/2004 8:50:42 PM PDT by Pikamax
CBS Says Producer Violated Policy by Putting Source in Touch With Kerry Aide By JIM RUTENBERG and BILL CARTER
Published: September 22, 2004
BS News said yesterday that the producer of its flawed report about President Bush's National Guard service violated network policy by putting a source in touch with a top aide to Senator John Kerry.
"It is obviously against CBS News standards and those of every other reputable news organization to be associated with any political agenda," the network said in a statement.
The rebuke of the producer, Mary Mapes, also broadcast last night on "The CBS Evening News," served to underscore the change in Ms. Mapes's status in the last week.
Leading up to the report on Sept. 8, on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," about the records, records that the news division now says it can no longer vouch for, Ms. Mapes was one of the most respected producers at the network.
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Her reputation was burnished in the spring, after the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," then called "60 Minutes II," reported in detail the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq.
Now executives at the news division say that high regard may have poked a fatal hole in its checking procedures, perhaps making some news executives less vigilant in asking hard questions about how the producer obtained documents.
Privately, network officials said they were caught off guard on Monday when Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry, told reporters that he had spoken to Bill Burkett, the source for the questionable documents, at the behest of Ms. Mapes.
On Monday, the news division announced that Mr. Burkett had misled Ms. Mapes and Dan Rather, the network anchor who presented the report, about the origins of the documents.
In an interview with Mr. Rather, Mr. Burkett admitted lying about their provenance, saying first that they came from a former Guard officer overseas and then that they came by way of a mysterious couple.
Officials of CBS News and CBS management have announced that they will name an independent committee to investigate how the report was prepared and broadcast.
Ms. Mapes, through a network spokeswoman, declined to comment. That Ms. Mapes is now at the center of such a lapse is hard to fathom, many colleagues at the network said.
"Mary Mapes has always been a first-class producer with an impressive body of work," said Jeff Fager, now the executive producer of the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes" who supervised her when he was executive producer of the Wednesday program. "I hope we all find out soon how this could have gone so horribly wrong."
For a week after the report, CBS News executives said they were confident about the authenticity and origins of the documents, even as experts stepped forward to say they could only have been produced by modern word processors.
Top network officials, who face questions about their roles in broadcasting the report, say part of that assuredness came from the confidence that Ms. Mapes showed in her source and the report.
Executives had reason for that confidence. At 48, Ms. Mapes is accomplished enough that producers for the "60 Minutes" Wednesday edition, which is based in New York, let her work from home in Dallas, similar to arrangements with several top producers.
She had all the more influence as Mr. Rather's designated producer on the Wednesday program, where she reported to Mr. Fager until this fall, when Josh Howard succeeded Mr. Fager.
Although the two editions share the name, they operate under separate top executives and, for the most part, maintain separate production teams and correspondents.
In recent days, two correspondents for the original Sunday edition, Morley Safer and Steve Kroft, have said the Guard report did not live up to their program's standards.
The Abu Ghraib scandal was one of several exclusives for Ms. Mapes, who began working for the news division in 1989, mostly as a producer for "The CBS Evening News."
In 1999, she secured for Mr. Rather an interview with Shawn Allen Berry, a white man who was convicted in the racially motivated killing of James Byrd Jr., whom Mr. Berry and two others dragged behind a pick-up truck near Jasper, Tex.
Ms. Mapes nearly went to jail for refusing to hand over tapes of the interview to prosecutors.
She also secured a major interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton after President Bill Clinton faced impeachment proceedings.
Mr. Rather and CBS executives said that Mr. Bush's Guard records had been intensely important to her, a subject she had been chasing with Mr. Rather off and on for five years.
Several people at the news division, who insisted on anonymity because they had been told not to talk to reporters, said one important line of inquiry in the internal inquiry would be whether Ms. Mapes's zeal clouded her judgment.
Some colleagues and associates questioned whether her politics could have interfered.
John Carlson, a colleague of Ms. Mapes at KIRO-TV in Seattle in the 1980's who is now the host of a conservative radio talk show there, said she was "ardently liberal.''
"When I heard about this story,'' Mr. Carlson said, "I said, 'I wonder if that's Mary, because she was someone who, like many advocacy journalists, went into journalism to try to change society.'
"She believed in what she was doing, and I think that she and other people at CBS would not have made the same mistakes had this story been about John Kerry.''
Mr. Fager, her old superviser, said the only thing he knew that drove Ms. Mapes was a passion to get a story and get it right.
Some colleagues expressed worry that Ms. Mapes would be a scapegoat and that others, like Mr. Rather; Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice president; and the CBS News president, Andrew Heyward, would not be held accountable.
Now executives at the news division say that high regard may have poked a fatal hole in its checking procedures, perhaps making some news executives less vigilant in asking hard questions about how the producer obtained documents.
Well, that explains why the CBS bigwigs let her and Danny run with the story so long -- Abu Ghraib was a large feather in Mapes' cap.
But Mapes is not a fool. She lives in Dallas, and has got to be very familiar with the Texas Democratic party landscape. She's been after the TANG story for years, knew who Burkett was, as does anyone who follows politics, and had to be well aware of his eccentricities (and that's a euphemism).
The only way Mapes and Rather would use Burkett as a fall guy is if they had a source they considered reliable to vouch for the docs -- a source that needed a cover.
Burkett is bonkers, but he is exactly the kind of tin-foil whacko that would go along with anonymous phone calls and document drops at a cattle auction -- in fact, the James Bond feel of the whole thing was probably the high point of his life. I can also see him burning the originals , as he was most likely instructed to do by his anonymous contact -- not necessary, but just an added thrill for for demented old Bill.
The lawsuit and and subsequent lawyering up was also planned by Burkett's handlers to silence him in the event Rather had to give up his identity.
The whole whacky story was a setup to hide the identity of the real source, who is someone both Mapes and Rather trusted -- someone so wholeheartedly trusted that they were blinded to the objections of document experts and a host of other players.
There really is no other logical explanation.
Newsmax reported this yesterday, and Rush mentioned it on the air. Do you know for sure that the regulations that are cited are wrong?
Needs a bit of work:
"It is obviously against CBS News standards and those of every other reputable news organization to be caught associating with any political agenda," the network said in a statement.
There. That's better.
Actually it's kind of funny to think of Joe Lockhart as having more scruples than CBS. I'm sure it wasn't ethics that motivated Joe, but at least he had the good sense to anticipate getting caught.
Vincent Bugliosi once said - "the obvious is usually true." Burkett didn't use CBS, CBS used Burkett. Remember the pressure to "release the documents" on him by Mapes?
CBS/Kerry/DNC already had the documents and were pressuring Burkett, the chump, to release them so they would have a paper trail.
Buchanan says Rather is in denial; others say "it's his gigantic ego" that is preventing CBS from making the correct business decision.
The obvious is - there are extensive links and coordination between CBS and the Kerry/DNC organization and instead of bringing down George Bush, if this is disclosed it brings down Kerry.
The logical solution for any other business would be to suspend Mapes, Rather and Heyland; find the truth and reveal it; CBS WILL NEVER REVEAL THE TRUTH BECAUSE THEY ARE GUILTY AND PEOPLE WOULD GO TO JAIL.
Don't look for a resolution to this because it will not come unless criminal charges are pressed that would get people to talk. Stonewalling is the game.
Even though I'm not a fan of them, the quickest way to get these guys under oath would be a Congressional hearing... Cox is still lobbying for one.
Now that would be a perfect job for her.
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