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JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL The Producer Meet Mary Mapes, the crusading journalist behind CBS's current troubles. Monday, October 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT SEATTLE--At a joint appearance over the weekend, the network news anchors began to circle the wagons in defense of the beleaguered Dan Rather. "There's a political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS," complained NBC's Tom Brokaw at a New York Public Library event Saturday. "It's a demagoguery unleashed on the Internet." ABC's Peter Jennings then weighed in. "I think the attack on CBS is an attack on mainstream media, an attack on the so-called 'liberal media,"...

NEW YORK — Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been let go for their role in preparing and reporting the controversial "60 Minutes" story about President Bush’s National Guard service before last year’s elections, according to CBS.

I am terribly disappointed in the conclusions of the report and its effects on the four of us who will no longer work at CBS News.... I am shocked by the vitriolic scape-goating in Les Moonves’s statement. I am very concerned that his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations -- ratings rather than journalism. Mr. Moonves’s response to the review panel’s report and the panel’s assessment of the evidence it developed in its investigation combine not only to condemn me, but to put all investigative reporting in the CBS tradition at risk. Much has been made about the...

The CBS "Rathergate"/"Memogate" independent panel report is out, and it is currently the talk of the blogosphere. I haven't had the time to read the full report, only to just skim it. But I have read CBS' official response quite closely, and here are my thoughts on it: Quite a few heads have rolled as a result of this weird incident, and rightly so. But because it is right doesn't make it less tragic. We see here seasoned professionals whose careers have possibly been ruined, and the worst thing of all is that the whole thing could have easily been...

MIDI - IT MUST HAVE BEEN LOVE As producer, shots I'm calling...my agenda I'd advance I'd be slamming pubbies...that was so easy...I'd go on one of my rants...of my rants I got caught in forgery...whoa is me I had a dream job, but it's over now I had a dream job...FReepers got me somehow I had a dream job, but it's over now I'll still get George Bush...I am making that vow We contended there's no bias...that's the lie that we had told We've been even handed...that's how we spun it...now I've watched it all unfold But I got...

110 DAYS TOO LATE: The whole report is a waste of time. POWERLINE, LilGreenFootballs, and dozens of others demonstrated that there was organized wrong doing months ago. The fact that Rather "was already planning on stepping down" was of course a protective move by CBS from the beginning. Everyone in the building new what was coming down, but because of blogs - so did most information junkies - and LONG before now. The part of the reports that are deeply disturbing and again proving that CBS has not learned anything from this silly excercise comes 10 PARAGRAPHS deep into their own story on...

Excerpt from CBS press release: ----------------- This brings us to two senior figures at CBS News whose performance is discussed in some depth in the Panel's report. Based on the findings of that report, we believe the following is appropriate: The Panel found that Dan Rather was pushed to the limit in the week before the September 8th broadcast. He was finishing up the anchoring job at the 2004 Republican Convention and was covering Hurricane Frances in Florida. He asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and over-enthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues...

WITH the CBS News investigation of Memogate almost done, Mary Mapes, the producer who obtained the fake memos used in Dan Rather's George Bush-bashing report, is fighting to save her job and her reputation. The sleuths at ratherbiased.com report Mapes wrote up a 68-page statement in her own defense and has been lobbying to convince the CBS probers that Rather's exposé on Bush's National Guard service was accurate, even if the documents obtained from a crackpot Texas Democrat were bogus. Rather acted preemptively by quitting as the "Evening News" anchor.

For some veterans of CBS News, the departure of Dan Rather from the network's evening newscast represents a kind of coda on a long, sad song of decline from greatness. The news organization that did the most to define broadcast news from the early days of radio through the golden age of television in the 1950's and 1960's has gone through a marked falloff in the last 15 years, probably suffering more than any other network from the shrinking of resources that matched its shrinking audiences. But the notion that Mr. Rather's decision to give up his anchor job is...

As Memogate moves out of the journalistic fiasco phase and into a more legalistic phase, the strength of CBS Legal’s Felony Abatement Plan (also known to prosecutors as ‘tampering’) will be put to test. There is ample evidence of criminal intent by CBS both pre-broadcast and post-broadcast. One as-yet unrealized consequence (other than to CBS Legal) is that communications between a lawyer and client are no longer privileged when the subject matter is furthering a crime or a fraud. The Texas forgery code provides that publication of two or more fake government documents is a felony. Hence, discussions between CBS...

CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves said the independent panel investigating the network's report on President Bush's National Guard service probably wouldn't complete its work before the presidential election. The Sept. 8 report on CBS's "60 Minutes" news magazine relied on now-discredited documents. While the scrutiny of Viacom Inc.'s CBS has faded somewhat, some media pundits warn that the longer the panel's inquiry takes, the more unsettled it leaves CBS. And against the argument that the report should come after the election to avoid any unintended influence or distraction, some counter that a delay makes the network seem to be dragging its...

SEATTLE--At a joint appearance over the weekend, the network news anchors began to circle the wagons in defense of the beleaguered Dan Rather. "There's a political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS," complained NBC's Tom Brokaw at a New York Public Library event Saturday. "It's a demagoguery unleashed on the Internet." ABC's Peter Jennings then weighed in. "I think the attack on CBS is an attack on mainstream media, an attack on the so-called 'liberal media," he told the audience. Mr. Rather said CBS executives have asked him not to comment on the botched story involving fabricated memos about President...

Mary Mapes's Darkest Hour The '60 Minutes' Producer Finds Herself Quite a Story By Jennifer Frey Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 4, 2004; Page C01 Mary Mapes received a care package from two of her best girlfriends the other day. What to send the woman in the eye of the CBS News firestorm? Wine, of course. And chocolates. A romance novel, amusingly titled "Texas Glory." Some Band-Aids to soothe life's little boo-boos. Tums. Also tucked inside was some under-eye concealer, to hide those awful dark circles that come with nights of sleep lost to worry. Oh, and a do-rag,...

In the spirit of fairness and accuracy, when referring to Mr. Rather or CBS, please append references with the appropriate symbols. Henceforth, CBS will be referred to as "(D)CBS.." ((D) for Democrat). When referring to Mr. Rather, please be sure to always include the honorary phrase "well-known Democratic operative". For example, " Well-known Democratic operative Dan Rather has memos regarding W's weather machine which is responsible for the spate of FL hurricanes...". Dan has toiled long and selflessly for the loony Left and has paid a heavy price. Kidnapped by Chicago taxi drivers, beaten by street tuffs demanding the frequency,...

Rush mentioned during Friday's show that the rumor floating around on the internet is that Mary Mapes is the person who actually FORGED the doccuments. This may have been fully vetted here and my search missed it. If so, please pull this thread. Otherwise, I wondering if there is any reporting on this "blogosphere rumor."

AT ITS BEST journalism is supposed to be a search for truth. As the scandal at CBS News has shown again, however, television network news organizations have for too long tolerated a system of deceptive reporting about who is the real author of the journalism that viewers see on their screens. The world is now aware that it was Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer, who found, wooed, and received documents from Bill Burkett, the former Texas National Guard officer who now cannot authenticate those documents. It was the anonymous Mapes, not the anchor star Dan Rather, who was the...

As he described it, Bill Burkett was sick of the Kerry campaign's sheer ineptitude. A member of the Progressive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party and a retired Army National Guardsman, he became incensed as he watched his candidate's credibility suffer from TV ads sponsored by Swift Boat veterans, while Kerry and his staff bungled their responses. Burkett wanted to do something about it, and believed he had the means to do it. But Kerry's people weren't listening. In an Internet posting, he candidly wrote that he waded through "seven layers of bureaucratic kids trying to get a job...

...[W]hat happened to Dan Rather and CBS suggests that the standard media model may be faltering, that in the future the way people get information about an event like Iraq will be different. Mary Mapes... is credited with surfacing the famously potent Abu Ghraib photos.... the media winds blew the Abu Ghraib images into a wildfire that burned through our politics for weeks.... Mapes expected the media winds to similarly carry their National Guard scoop. But the wind shifted, and the media bonfire engulfed them instead.... Alternative media, primarily Internet bloggers, dismantled their story. For years, there has been a...

<p>Former National Guard commander Bill Burkett has become the first player in the CBS forged document scandal to implicate John Kerry's presidential campaign, telling the Fort Worth Star Telegram that top Kerry aide Joe Lockhart pressed him to turn over damaging evidence on George Bush.</p>

From "Kerry's Brain," an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker: Page 67: "Last week, the Vietnam War became an issue again. Democrats seized upon new evidence that seemed to show that George W. Bush had used political influence to be assigned to the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War."