Posted on 10/07/2005 5:16:26 PM PDT by JustAnotherOkie
NEW YORK Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post might have a bigger scoop than he thought. In his online column this morning, as a final, almost throwaway item, he quoted from the first chapter of the forthcoming book by former CBS producer Mary Mapes that covers, among other things, her controversial experience with the Dan Rather/Bush/National Guard “60 Minutes” segment.
Among the excerpts: "I was incredulous that the mainstream press -- a group I'd been a part of for nearly twenty-five years and thought I knew -- was falling for the blogs' critiques. I was shocked at the ferocity of the attack. I was terrified at CBS's lack of preparedness in defending us. I was furious at the unrelenting attacks on Dan. And I was helpless to do anything about any of it."
He said he had drawn the brief excerpts from the first chapter, which had been posted (as sometimes happens with new books) at amazon.com. He also provided a link. But the link goes to a dead Amazon page. In fact, the book (which is due out on Nov. 8) seems to have disappeared completely from Amazon, except for its audio version (Mapes narrates herself).
Barnes and Noble still has the book, which is called “Truth and Duty, “ online, with the Nov. 8 pub date (and no excerpt). The book is still featured at the site of the publisher, St. Martin's Press, which promises an excerpt--but not until pub day.
Calls to a publicist at St. Martin's have not yet been returned.
One clue in the mystery is that Kurtz writes that he had been meaning to get to this item “for some time,” so perhaps the excerpt got pulled a few days ago. But it doesn't explain why the entire book has gone missing at Amazon.
Among the excerpts quoted by Kurtz:
-- “And right now, on the Internet, it appeared everything was falling apart. I had a real physical reaction as I read the angry online accounts. It was something between a panic attack, a heart attack, and a nervous breakdown. My palms were sweaty; I gulped and tried to breathe. . . . The little girl in me wanted to crouch and hide behind the door and cry my eyes out."
--"Faxing changes a document in so many ways, large and small, that analyzing a memo that had been faxed -- -in some cases not once, but twice -- -was virtually impossible. The faxing destroyed the subtle arcs and lines in the letters. The characters bled into each other. The details of how the typed characters failed to line up perfectly inside each word were lost."
--"To these people, there was no such thing as unbiased mainstream reporting, certainly not when it came to criticism of the president, no matter how tepid. To them, there was Fox News and everything else -- and everything else was liberal and unfair."
Does this mean FR can sue for slander after it's published?
I get the feeling that outside of FR nobody really knows who she is. :P
Damn, Doc... every time I meet you I gain even more respect for you...
Her charge that faxing this document somehow made all of those old typeface letters come into complete alignment with the typeface of MS Word is so ridiculous that I'm insulted. The same lameness that attended the original lie, too obvious to fly!
It seems to be true. I just searched Amazon for Mary Mapes, and all I got was a book by another Mary Mapes about Indianapolis and a bunch of children's books by Mary Mapes Dodge, who evidently was a better and more honest person than her descendant.
As a rule Barnes & Noble pushes liberal books and hides conservative ones, whereas Amazon appears to be fairly impartial.
I imagine this is temporary, until after the announced publication date. I can't imagine Mapes would be stupid enough to remove her book from one of the biggest outlets.
"wanted to crouch and hide behind the door and cry my eyes out."
People that lie and get caught sometimes have this reaction.
Many little children do this when they get caught fibbing to their parents!
That's odd. You provide a working link to the book, yet when I searched for Mary Mapes I failed to find it.
You have to give her credit. She has leapt from #255,000 on the list to around 155,000, which is a whole 100,000 better than yesterday!
Everyone's a bad guy, except for me -- and I have the memos to prove it!
Bizarre! Now I find that if I click on your link, about two times out of three I get a "looking for something" notice, and then if I click again I find the book. Something strange is going on with their server.
It's a pretty slow website.
Oh, I'm just getting all choked up. Maybe she just needed some milk and cookies.
Somebody has this backwards. You say from 255000 to 155000, and Paleo said 155000 to 255000. I couldn't find it.
Faxed, not faked, but true argument?
I also noticed that the editorial review of the audio version does not disclose the reviewer and their employer.
What a crock!
Screw Mary Mapes. She should be in jail.
Still lying I see. She must be related to Bill Clinton. They have the same vice.
Hmmmm, that sounds just like Hillary's reaction when she found out about Monica. Does Mapes use the same ghostwriter?
She still never explains why the supposed "memos" look like they were written with Word. If the memos was genuine then there she should be able to show how they were written using using 1970's typewriter technology.
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