Posted on 09/27/2005 5:44:14 AM PDT by RatherBiased.com
Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired for her role in Memogate, has come out with her new book, Truth and Duty : The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power.
In it she mentions some encouraging words from Dan Rather, offering his support for her in her darkest hour.
I knew I could count on Dan. In tough situations, he became “fightin’ Dan,” someone who told us all to “never back up, never back down, never give up, never give in.” I was glad to hear from him and reassured by his reaction to all of it.Dan told me he was confident in the story and that he was lucky to work with me. He signed off by saying something that had become a shorthand for us over the years: “F-E-A.” That was code for “F---’Em All,” a sentiment that needed to be expressed from time to time in any newsroom. Dan was too much of a gentleman to say the real thing---at least most of the time. But he knew that when I was under deadline or work pressure I was hard put to find any sentence that couldn’t be improved by the liberal use of the “f”-word. At this point, I deeply appreciated the sentiment.
Mapes also claimed that the first criticism of the documents appeared before 60 Minutes had even ended and before the documents were put up on the CBS website. But the forum hosting the criticism was from the West coast, with an earlier timezone.
Mapes also demonstrated what could be a lack of knowledge about just what it was people were criticizing. She referred to "peripheral spacing" appearing on some typewriters, when the actual term was "proportional spacing."
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.
I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name “Buckhead,” set the tone for what was to come.
There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.
Note from the thread, the documents were linked at 11:17 pm EST and Buckhead's comment comes just before midnight. She STILL! can't get her facts straight.
OK, Ok, lots of other posters noticed this before me, as I see now that I read through the rest of the thread. Just shows how on the ball FReepers are and how NOT on the ball the MSM is.
The documents were proven to be frauds, and yet we are obligated to "analyze what they said, look at the content, and compare them with the official record?"
Liberals are utterly insane.
Actually, the first analysis of the documents on FR was not from Buckhead and it did concern itself with content and style, rather than typography.
Buckhead was the first or among the first to point out the unlikely use of proportional fonts.
The killer analysis, however, came from non-FR people who had actually participated in designing computer fonts.
But there WAS plenty of analysis of the content as well as the typefaces of these memos within 24 hours of their release, by people here at FR as well as at Powerline, LGF, and other sites. There was mention that the term "CYA" may not have been in use in 1972; that General Staudt, who was supposedly pressuring Lt. Col. Killian in 1973, had actually retired from the TANG in 1972; that memos were not used to order Guardsmen to report for physicals, they used letters; etc. Mapes is FOS.
I guess we're all members of the VHCPAHRWC--Vast, hard core, politically angry, hyperconservative Right Wing Conspiracy!!
Yes, but Mapes ascribes that first entry to Buckhead. While it's true that suspicions were voiced during the broadcast, it isn't true that Buckhead's identification of the docs as created on a modern word processor occurred before those same docs were made available by CBS, which is what Mapes is trying to imply.
That's because anyone who had been in the military in the 1970's could see there was something funky about those "documents." But then, nobody at cBS knows people like that, do they???
She doesn't seem to understand that conservatives have jobs too, and (gasp) some of us even work at printing companies. Some of even (horrified gasp) examine fonts with 100x microscopes and make our own in packages like Fontographer. But...but...Conservatives aren't experts at anything -- we all know the liberals are the know-it-alls in the world. /sarc
Isn't Mapes' contention based on the fact when a nonmember visits Free Republic, the time stamp defaults to Pacific Time, while members have the option to view in their own time?
Of course, she's making these statements to insinuate that an evil Republican conspirator somehow sandbagged them while trying to assert that only the form, not the contents of the discredited forgeries was investigated. The mind boggles.
She truly is jaw-droppingly stupid!
Busted by FR, LGF and Power Line!! The New Press Rules!!
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
I agree completely, she is either stupid, or lying, or both I guess. The real detailed analysis didn't come out for days either. Especially that one by that font/typeface geek, forgot his name. THE killer analysis..
I never worked at a printing company, but I spent a semester in seventh grade sorting lead type in shop class. In the early 1970s I edited a little magazine that was set with an IBM Composer. The printer ran it from a minicomputer that handled all the justification and even the spell checking.
I was pretty sure TANG didn't provide this machine to office clerks.
Heh :) those old typesetters cost a fortune. I was a little later in the industry but even our old 202 cost an arm and a leg, and the full-blown XYVision cost as much as a small mansion. No way did office clerks get their hands on such equipment.
All of that is irrelevant when the document is an obvious fake.
Some CBS executive had the BJ Clinton agenda.
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."Whatever they were" was people who had worked with this kind of stuff on a day by day basis and knew the intricacies of the field intimately. They could comment right off the top of their head far better than any network-selected "expert"...much like Romeo Crennell can say more about the pros and cons of the zone blitz in ten minutes than Chris Collingsworth can say with a week of study.
-Eric
Another silly book I won't buy by a so-called author who must get her news from DU or the daily kos--???
Dan and Mary where certainly blind to the obvious.
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