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Ruthless People: Rathergate Producer Mary Mapes, CBS News, and the Chicago All-Stars Any day now, CBS News'
internal Rathergate report will be read by the executive suits at CBS’ “Black Rock” fortress, and producer Mary Mapes will likely be fired. |
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A few weeks ago, at Rather Biased, I came across a story about a CBS News
producer who’d been fired, “CBS Fires Trigger-happy Producer.” “So, they
finally got around to Mary Mapes,” says I. No such luck. The tarnished Tiffany
network had unceremoniously dumped a news producer for interrupting a broadcast
of its popular new crime series, CSI: New York,
for a report on the death of Arab terrorist Yasser Arafat. It seems while
honesty in reporting counts for little at CBS these days, hot entertainment
properties are sacred. The November 13 Rather Biased dispatch follows: Granted, the producer had violated a direct order not to interrupt the show without the permission of a superior officer. TV executives may have contempt for the military chain of command, but have zero tolerance for insubordination on their own turf. Mary Mapes is the CBS News producer who most recently brought us the Abu Ghraib and Rathergate stories. The Abu Ghraib story presented American soldiers in charge of a section of the Abu Ghraib military detainee facility reserved for terrorists, as if they were torturers and war criminals. The story, which was reported separately by Mapes for CBS News and Sy Hersh for the New Yorker, represented in both cases an instance of defining journalistic deviance down. Hersh and Mapes both sought to recreate the scandal of Vietnam’s My Lai massacre, but without the massacre. This is what happens when journalists go from seeing themselves as patriots supporting America, as they did in World War II, to seeing themselves as revolutionaries, destroying her, as they have since the War in Vietnam. If FDR had had to put up with the likes of Mapes and Hersh, today we’d be speaking German. In Rathergate, Mapes used forged documents in an attempt to cost George W. Bush re-election, by presenting the then-Texas Air National Guard officer as a shirker, as insubordinate, and possibly even a deserter who succeeded only through the intervention of powerful friends. Mapes’ source for the forgeries, Bill Burkett, a former Texas Air National Guard lieutenant colonel with a longtime, public grudge against the Bushes, argued in his defense that he did not seek out Mapes; she sought him out. (Burkett has also denied that he produced the forgeries, though no one has been able to find the mystery woman that, he claims, gave them to him.) At the time, CBS claimed Mapes had been “working on” the story for five years, yet she had nothing to show for it, prior to Burkett giving her the forgeries. And in spite of CBS News’ document experts having doubts about the documents’ authenticity, Mapes rushed the story onto the air four days later. The September 19 New York Times quoted Mapes’ executive producer, Josh Howard as saying, In an earlier, pre-TV era, Mary Mapes would have been fired for even suggesting the Abu Ghraib story to a major newspaper’s editor. Prior to the War on Terror, it was unheard of to take minor excesses and seek to impugn and risk the lives of America’s soldiers, let alone to seek with a hoax to cost a wartime president the White House. And yet, prior to Rathergate, inside CBS News, Mapes was one of the division’s most respected producers. (There is, however, an earlier case of the media seeking to cost a wartime president the White House with a true story -- the Pentagon Papers case from 1971, involving Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg, the Washington Post, and the New York Times during Richard Nixon’s first term of office. Ellsberg broke the law, in leaking classified documents to the above-named newspapers. The same members of the socialist mainstream media (SMSM) who consider Ellsberg a hero for his leaks, have sought to have White House officials imprisoned for legally informing columnist Robert Novak that the wife of Nigergate fraud Joseph C. Wilson IV, Valerie Plame, is a CIA employee.) Jailhouse Rock You may be wondering if perhaps Mapes’ misconduct was the product of an anti-Bush newsroom hysteria that gripped the SMSM during the 2004 campaign. After all, she couldn’t possibly have been so respected at CBS News, if she had a history of dishonesty … could she? Well. As Fox News reporter Brian Wilson revealed on September 22, Mapes had been reprimanded three years earlier by J.E. Gunja, the warden of the federal prison in Florence, CO, and stripped of her journalistic privileges regarding prisoner Peter Langan. Mapes may have seen what she did in Colorado as merely cutting a deal with the prisoners, in exchange for access. Apparently, it didn’t occur to her, that federal prisons are not her personal playgrounds. Had the information that Mapes passed between Langan and the other white supremacist been part of a criminal conspiracy, she would have been an accomplice. Heck, she could have been prosecuted, in any event. And had an ordinary American been guilty of the same offense, I can assure you, he’d have ended up in the dock, answering federal criminal charges. Note that, following the same m.o. as in Colorado, Mapes gave Rathergate hoaxer Bill Burkett access to DNC flack Joe Lockhart, in exchange for Burkett’s “documents.” Now, Mapes has gone too far, even for an era which has seen the mainstreaming of treason. The only way to really unearth the Rathergate story, will be for a federal prosecutor to subpoena Mapes, Burkett, Lockhart, CBS News anchor Dan Rather, CBS News chief Andrew Heyward, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe and perhaps others, in a criminal probe. Since Mapes and Rather were involved -- willingly or no -- in a felony (the attempt to subvert an election through fraud), they can no longer hide behind the First Amendment. The Producer as News Auteur Producers are arguably the most powerful figures in TV news magazine journalism; they decide what stories are run, and they usually research and write them. Because of their status and behind-the-scenes role, they have either not been reported on, or have been presented as heroes (e.g., former 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman in the movie, The Insider). Mary Mapes should change all of that. In a richly informative yet succinct article in the September 27 Chicago Tribune, “The Dirty Little Secret of TV Newsmagazines,” John Cook interviewed longtime TV news pros on the role of the producer on TV news magazines like CBS’ 60 Minutes, ABC’s 20/20 and Prime Time Live, NBC’s Dateline, etc. News stars like Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, et al., then are essentially actors in a drama created by a producer who functions like the movie director of auteur theory who has total creative control over a picture. And I mean, creative. Feldstein observed that the producer conducts most of the interviews, and Cook noted that the producer will usually write the script that the “reporter” reads aloud to the audience. Rathergate was, however, an exception to the rule. As the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund wrote on October 4, Mr. Rather has acknowledged that he was deeply invested in the story, and when he learned Ms. Mapes had gotten the documents from Bill Burkett, a controversial former National Guard lieutenant colonel, he asked Mr. Heyward to take charge. In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Rather quoted himself as telling Mr. Hayward [sic], “I have to ask you to oversee, in a hands-on way, the handling of the story.” According to Mr. Rather, “He got it. He immediately agreed.”Rather and Heyward supported the story, based on their long acquaintance with Mapes, and their respect for her professionalism and character. Let’s get better acquainted with that professionalism and character. Same as She Ever Was Mary Mapes got her start in the news business at CBS’ Seattle affiliate, KIRO. One of her early stories involved a 1987 police shooting of a black drug dealer. As John Fund chronicled, The [Erdman] Bascomb shooting angered many people in Seattle, and officials quickly organized an inquest. Then KIRO aired an incendiary story titled “A Shot in the Dark,” in which a previously unknown witness named Wardell Fincher accused the cops involved in the raid of lying. He said he saw officers arrive at the house, burst in with no warning and shoot Bascomb, who might not have even known the intruders were cops. The story shifted to possible criminal wrongdoing by the police. Mr. Fincher was summoned to the inquest, and previous witnesses recalled. The reporter for the sensational segment was Mark Wrolstad, now a reporter with the Dallas Morning News. The producer was his wife, Mary Mapes.The admiring former KIRO reporter’s attempt to find positives in Mapes’ career reminds me of the rationalizations some New York Times staffers gave for the rise of Jayson Blair, because he supposedly “broke stories.” Frauds like Jayson Blair and Mary Mapes don’t “break” stories, they make them up. That Mapes not only wasn’t disciplined (much less, fired) for “A Shot in the Dark,” but was apparently “fast-tracked” based on it, speaks volumes about CBS’ Seattle outfit, Dan Rather, and the News Division at CBS’ national headquarters at “Black Rock” in New York. Let’s see what some bloggers had to contribute regarding Mary Mapes’ professionalism and character (a tip of the hat to Michelle Malkin). Random Nuclear Strikes: AnalogKid at Random Nuclear Strikes: You have to bear in mind, that there are thousands of Mary Mapeses in the SMSM, destroying people’s lives for the sake of power, money, prestige, and the desire to bring down America. Every time I hear the euphemism “liberal bias,” my blood pressure goes up ten points. We’re talking about Marxists here, folks. The first time I personally experienced a reporter seeking to destroy the life of a white cop for shooting a black man (for risking his life against a shotgun-wielding bad guy, in defense of a black neighborhood, not that the white, female, Marxist reporter gave a damn), was in 1975. Eventually the hero cop was set up, and beaten almost to death. In that case, just as Mary Mapes would do in 1987 in Seattle, and in 2004 on 60 Minutes, the reporter had published vicious, baseless claims that came from sources lacking any credibility. And as in Mapes’ case, the stories were not the sort of unintentional tragedies that befall even the best reporters from time to time, but rather the products of journalistic malice and contempt for the truth, better known by the euphemism, a desire for “justice.” How many times have we seen the same scam by a reporter since then? Hundreds? Thousands? Every time you read a story or see one on TV, in which a reporter is trying to get an innocent cop lynched, or perpetrating some other sort of race or political hoax, keep in mind: There goes another Mary Mapes. Perhaps the worst indictment of Josh Howard, Dan Rather, and Andrew Heyward, is that they had confidence in, and respected Mary Mapes. Ruthlessness ain’t Always Bad Mary Mapes is clearly a ruthless individual, and yet, merely being ruthless is not in itself a vice in the news business. In fact, it is a virtue, if you want to read and see great true stories. Otherwise, you’d have to shut down all news media. The public’s discontent with the media is not monolithic; it has several roots. One root is the dominant SMSM’s leftwing bias and increasing practice of fraud. Another is the related but not identical feeling that the media have contempt for the predominantly Christian folks in “flyover country” between the media subculture’s landing zones in New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. Though Republicans would have you believe that such contempt is limited to the SMSM, I think much of the Republican mainstream media (RMSM) is guilty of it, as well. (Like “Middle America,” “flyover country” is more a mythic or symbolic than a geographic notion, anyway. To media types, places like Queens and upstate New York are also “flyover country.”) A third, related source of discontent arises from journalists’ ruthlessness in joyfully destroying the lives of ordinary people. The problem in journalism isn’t ruthlessness per se, but what kind of ruthlessness. Sources do not just appear on a journalist’s doorstep every morning, dying to blow the whistle on corruption. A journalist who can’t cultivate sources, won’t report many great or even good stories. And most people’s complaints about the media notwithstanding, they WANT those stories. Big stories entertain readers and viewers, elevate their feelings of superiority over the “bad guys,” permit them to feel pity (i.e., more feelings of superiority) for the “victims,” feel fortunate (“There but for the grace of God go I”), give them something to talk about with family, friends, and colleagues, and help them make sense of the world. Briefer, blood-and-guts stories fulfill the same function, though not as powerfully. As the TV news saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Again, while many people complain about bloody crime stories on the news, put on a bloodless news broadcast, and see how many people tune in. And as for the Sunday school ethics lectures by journalism professors, ask them how many stories they’ve broken. Let’s look at some ruthless but honest reporters, from journalism’s past. My Kind of Town, Chicago is … In Richard Ciccone’s biography of the legendary Chicago columnist, Mike Royko: A Life in Print, Ciccone tells a succinct yet vivid history of the hard-charging, hard-drinking, violently competitive tradition of Chicago newspapering that Mike Royko (1932-1997) in many ways embodied, and which may have died with him. Is This the End of Mary? Any day now, the CBS News internal Rathergate report will be completed and read by the executive suits in the executive suites at CBS’ “Black Rock” fortress. When Rathergate became a full-blown scandal, CBS appointed former U.S. Attorney General and liberal GOP Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh, and former Associated Press chief, Louis Boccardi, to investigate the matter. When the report comes out, Mary Mapes will likely be fired. As Rather Biased reported on December 7, in “Mapes’s Last Stand,” She’s still arguing that the story is ‘fake but true.’ After five years of allegedly working the story! What do detectives always say? “Criminals are creatures of habit.” To reiterate, what makes Mary Mapes bad news is not her ruthlessness, but her willingness to hype stories (Abu Ghraib) she has no business telling in the first place, and (the 1987 drug shooting, the Rathergate hoax) her willingness to spread lies, in order to harm those she hates. And the problem with the Mary Mapeses of the world is not limited to the phony stories they broadcast, but the countless true stories they squelch or ignore. Dan Rather has announced that he will retire as evening news anchor on March 9, his 24th anniversary on the job as Walter Cronkite’s successor; pc understudy John Roberts is Rather’s likely successor. Andrew Heyward, who will most likely be fired along with Mapes, will then be replaced by one of the usual suspects, possibly Jeff Fager, who vouched for Mary Mapes’ character. And now, we return to our regularly scheduled program. New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at The Critical Critic. |
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