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.
Advertisement
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.
LOL!
Mary... do you really want to be the fall "guy"?
Setting Mapes up to take the fall. If that happens, I wonder
how she will react and what she would have to say.
Mary... none of us believe that you made that call, without prodding from the "man"
Cat fight...
Um yeah, New York Times, the CBS story is a bit more than simply "flawed," as you suggest.
You crack me up!
Obvious? Obvious to who?
ROTFLMAOIMPJ's
Mary... this is just another example of the Male Hegemony throwing a woman "under the bus"
Hey Mary, they're gonna fire you 'cause you're the girl.
Will Mary 'take one for the team', the "team" being a bit more generic and global reaching than the good ol' boys at CBS.
Stop it - I just ate.
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.
And there, sports fans, is your sacrificial "lamb". In Birkenstocks.
She's smart enough to take one for the team, because she knows that after a couple of months of vacation, she'll be quietly hired as a campaign consultant by the Democrats. This will probably wind up being a career boost for her, as long as she plays ball.
"What's the frequency, Kenneth?"
Cbs is toast.
5.56mm
"Ms. Mapes is the greatest of all time.
However, someone needs to die on the tracks."
Hang em all! oops I mean they all should be "pink slipped"!
Wow. I mean Friggin' Wow. Does anyone else feel like they're living in some kind of alternate universe?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.