Illuminating Mary Mapes

The CBS fake memo has been covered quite a bit round these parts, but I had not seen much information about Mary Mapes, Producer of 60 Minutes, until now. The linked piece has some info about here.

It ends, though, as all stories about this topic must end, with Dan Rather.

Mr. Carlson says he wishes his former colleague would let the story go. She clearly cared too much about "her" story of George W. Bush slacking in the National Guard. After it aired, CBS proudly proclaimed she had been working on it for five years. Mr. Rather has acknowledged that Mr. Burkett did not approach CBS News with the memos. Rather, Ms. Mapes approached him about whether he could find documents challenging Mr. Bush's military service. He quickly obliged. Ms. Mapes clearly wanted the memos to be real, and she and the CBS executives overseeing it rushed the story on air only four days after receiving all the documents--despite flashing red-lights from the document examiners they consulted.

Mr. Carlson says that among its other sins, CBS simply didn't realize that most people don't care if Mr. Bush missed a physical while the Vietnam War was winding down more than 30 years ago. As one prominent journalist recently put it: "In the end, what difference does it make what one candidate or the other did or didn't do during the Vietnam War? In some ways, that war is as distant as the Napoleonic campaigns." The man who spoke those words--at a time when John Kerry was under attack by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--was Dan Rather.

John Fund on Mary Mapes.

And there's more: John Leo enumerates a number of instances of outright bias in recent media coverage of Election 2004.