Posted on 09/17/2004 6:24:10 AM PDT by OESY
...Ms. Mapes, 48 years old, is a workaholic who spends years developing and nurturing relationships that might pay off in marquee scoops. CBS News executives say she spent two months reporting the Abu Gharib story before it was ready for broadcast. She spent close to five years digging into Mr. Bush's National Guard history....
Ms. Mapes also produced Wednesday's follow-up segment in which CBS -- after a week of dismissing calls for an internal investigation and defending the documents as authentic -- said it was aggressively investigating the source of the documents and acknowledged there was a legitimate chance they could be forgeries....
Ms. Mapes has extensive experience with politically sensitive news stories. Aside from the Abu Gharib story, her résumé includes persuading the biracial daughter of Strom Thurmond to talk on television for the first time and award-winning stories on the aftermath of 1991's Desert Storm.
...[S]ays Jon Klein, a former high-ranking CBS News executive, "She's the last person you'd ever expect to be in a controversy about credibility," he says. "She is one of the most credible people in the industry."
...In 1999, Ms. Mapes emerged from behind the camera when she refused a district judge's order to turn over a videotape and transcript of an interview Mr. Rather conducted with Shawn Allen Berry, one of three white men later convicted of dragging a black man to death behind their pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. Twice found in contempt of court orders, Ms. Mapes narrowly avoided jail time when CBS agreed to publish a full transcript on its Web site....
Ms. Mapes grew up in rural western Washington and landed her first big news job as a producer at the Seattle television station KIRO....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Miss Mapes ain't Miss Marple.
Finished or not, it was now or never. The allegations/lies have no value AFTER the election.
* In Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, attempting to paint a picture of the guts it took to be a fighter jock in the 50's and 60's, Wolfe specifically speaks of the F102 as a "brick with fins" that was very dangerous.
We should all go to the local department store and get a sample of the perfume by that name and send it to her at Cbs.....
So. She spent 5 years of he life digging for dirt on a story that the majority of Americans care nothing about because - there's nothing there. I get a little 'Captain Ahab' feeling about this - like the obsessive search for Moby Dick, Mary was searching for the big story to bring down President Bush. (Of course, analogy breaks down because I doubt Mary had been attacked and wounded by President Bush in past years, but you get the idea) It would be impossible for others not to know what she was after, so they provided it for her.
She (and Dan) wanted so badly for those forgeries to be real, that they didn't dig very deeply as to the provenance of those documents, and so here we are today.
In the Moby Dick story, some of the crew was begging him to turn back, while Captain Ahab was standing on the deck of the ship, shouting into the wind, "Drive on, Starbuck! Drive on!". Can you picture some of the CBS execs begging Dan Rather to turn back, while he defiantly stands fast?
With all the time and painstaking efforts has Ms. Mapes ever broken a story that did NOT cary the water for the Democrats?
She could have spent less than two weeks and had the bombshell of her career --- a president facing impeachment was a rapist.
They're an interesting crowd -- childishly naive, and yet viciously activist. Molly Ivins is a perfect example of the sort....
Heck, airing the Abu Ghraib story was irresponsible, because the Pentagon was already investigating it, and asked CBS to hold off to save US military lives, due to the bad blood such a story would engender. Bottom line, ideology has blinded Mapes and Rather, and it has finally caught up with them.
She actually looks like a younger "Helen Thomas"
I dunno, the analogy might be good after all -- if she's been working on this so long, she was probably among those "wounded" when their ill-conceived hunt after Bush went wrong... instead of learning from her mistake, she obsesses on revenge. I think Moby Dick is the perfect analogy.
Now, which CBS staffer is going to be the one to escape the wreckage and say, "call me Ishmael"?
Anyone who watched the "Insider" movie has been led to believe that CBS and "60 Minutes" prefer eyewitness testimony to documentary evidence; in that Big Tobacco story "60 Minutes" producer Companero Hewitt demanded an eyewitness before they would present any documents. So what are we to conclude about the alleged faith that Rather/CBS had in the "unimpeachable" partisan and/or looney tunes sources that they would not go forward with this story in 2004 (or in 2000) absent the falsified documents? For Rather and "60 Minutes" the "witnesses" were the suspect part of the story, the documents were the "unimpeachable" source. Unfortunately, "the White House" in the form of the supposed mastermind Karl Rove and Miscommunication Director Bartlett fed CBS' confidence in their story by blithely accepting the phony documents as factual, and then reissuing them to the entire universe. As to the notion that SUSPECT Mapes and CBS "worked" on this story for "five years", the actual work (less the documents) was done in 2000. The story then went dormant until the 2004 campaign heated up, at which time Mapes either revisited it with the "unimpeachables", or one of the "unimpeachables" (probably SUSPECT Barnes) resurfaced it with her.
So all she could come up with were [poorly] forged documents that *insinuated* what she wanted 'em to?
Ugly.
...as her mug.
If she had found the story, say, 2 1/2 ears ago would she have bothered? Of course not because it wouldn't have any traction at that point.
Ms. Mapes, 48 years old, is a workaholic who spends years developing and nurturing relationships that might pay off in marquee scoops. CBS News executives say she spent two months reporting the Abu Gharib story before it was ready for broadcast. She spent close to five years digging into Mr. Bush's National Guard history....
Burkett served as a military advisor to Moore in F911. Just FYI.
"CBS News executives say she spent two months reporting the Abu Gharib story before it was ready for broadcast."
Yep! And since Burkett worked with Michael Moore on Fahrenheit 9/11 (or so Burkett claimed in his bio), and since Michael Moore had footage from Abu Gharib BEFORE it became public, and since....GOOD GRIEF!! this is one complicated mess.
And in five years of working on the story, she never thought to talk to Killian's secretary until after the story had blown up in their faces and someone else had done the leg work to get the secretary to admit that the documents are fakes. Then because the old crank is also rabidly Anti-Bush, she's suddenly material for CBS News. So they put her on to rebutt their own story, creating Rather's epitaph (Fake, but Acccurate) in the process. Yep, that Mapes is quite the producer.
You said it; and not just her.
Ben Barnes
James Moore
Bill Burkett
Paul Begala
And hundreds more
The Texas Democrats are after him for sure. And for years.
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