The best part? They're already referring to her in the past tense.

Liberals are scary...they believe in "activist" judges, and "activist" journalists...in short, their moral relativism allows them to rationalize the old Machiavellian philosophy of the ends justifying the means...in short, they have no problems usurping power in any way possible if it fits their desires...

It is scary when one says about a journalist:
"She's not the sort of person who went into journalism to report the news and offer an array of commentary."

Basically, that means that she did not go into journalism to do journalism, but to usurp a degree of power not granted to her in our democracy.

Don't abet CBS' scapegoating of Mapes. Rather's in it as deeply as she is. The lying fraud still won't admit the documents are forgeries - that alone should earn him his walking papers.

I'm tempted to send both Rather and Mapes a thank-you card every November 2 for the next 4 years. Just to be mean.

KevinM: Love it! I've made a reminder for this November 3rd on my calender.

The only thing I'd like to see sent to Mapes is an indictment on federal charges for the illegal possession of classified military records and pictures in the Abu-Grahib prison abuse "manufactured scandal," which was another CBS attempt to change the outcome of an election. Was Mapes also the producer of the Viacom parade of book attacks on Bush, or was that some other fair minded and un-biased producer?

J. Edgar Hogg -

How exactly was Abu-Grahib a "manufactured scandal?"

Abu Ghraib was a genuine scandal, but it certainly didn't merit the attention and finger-pointing that was focused on it. First off, the military had already investigated and brought charges against suspects before it ever got to CBS. And secondly, the enemy in Iraq is actually cutting the heads off innocent people - if the worst we're accused of is posing war criminals for Mapplethorpe-style photos, that's not too bad.

Mary Mapes shouldn't be that much of a surprise. She is a known quantity, having been around CBS News since 1989. She comes out of Seattle (home of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose main positive feature is their cartoonist, who is both good and wrong, politically). Mary comes off her big triumph: Abu Ghraib. Now she is presumably headed for the door along with Dan Rather (if there was any justice)

Do a little searching around. There are worst prison abuse scandals in Massachusetts.

http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking2/MAAbuse.html

There is no sense of proportion with these people. If Bush had admitted to committing war crimes, I doubt he'd get a pass.

I'm not really loving this. I hope Mapes is not going to be the be-all-end-all scapegoat for SEE-BS, because she certainly was not alone in acting the fool. I have a bad feeling that she WILL be the only one taking the fall here.

Chris: I tend to not trust the karma effect myself, but I think the revelation of Burkett as "unimpeachable source" is the last straw for DRather. That is not a mistake. That is a deliberate and laughable lie and I have seen a lot of mention of that disparity in the MSM and among media types. Even academics are pointing to that as a very misleading statement. Even CBS said they were investigating that specific issue. Duh! can only cover certain aspects of this scandal and this is not one of them.

What about Heywood? Certainly he should go down with Mapes. Rather will never quit until someone pries his cold dead fingers off his IBM Selectric Composer.

Meh. She's just gonna get a job with the DNC.

Ah, yes - the "Post-Intelligencer" ...

That's the paper's whose motto is

"The Post-Intelligencer - as intelligent as a Post", right? ;)

She does seem like toast (this is off the radio commentary):

According to KVI AM 570 talk show host John Carlson, who worked with Mary in the '80s, she's had something similar happen before.

In 1987, working for KIRO TV 7 Seattle, Mary Mapes was a producer on a story called 'Shot in the Dark'. As the Bloods & Crips were carving up turf in Seattle, the police had started a new aggressive procedure of raiding crack houses. On one of the raids, the man inside leapt up and pointed a black shiny thing at the police - which got him shot. The dead man was black - and racial tensions and outrage went through the roof. Near the end of the inquest, KIRO airs 'A Shot in the Dark', an _eyewitness_ account from a man who none of the other observers had seen. His account was "No one knocked, they just busted in and started shooting up the place." Which was a long way from the police account.

Practically the entire inquest had to be redone to ask more questions of all the witnesses. Eventually, they got to a reporter from the Seattle PI, which had been along on the raid as an 'embed'. His testimony was that 1) the new witness had NOT been an eyewitness - he'd stumbled out of the blackberry bushes outside while the aid car was tending to the corpse with statements like "Dude, what's up?" No one else could recall the witness inside - and the inquest ends up with the police story as the official findings.

Mary Mapes - her sole piece of evidence destroyed - flies into a rage. And moves on to CBS Evening News.

I don't see how she avoids being the scapegoat. Dan should go for "We went the _extra_ mile with this one." His boss too. But it doesn't seem like CBS is going to do the right thing.

I am hearing a lot about what the future holds for Mapes, Rather, and CBS. The talking heads are saying CBS is just making mistake after mistake. What if CBS isn't making mistakes?

Think about there actions and inactions. A major corporation just CANNOT exist if it's run with people so incompetent they can't know that Mapes should be an insta-fire because of her association with the Kerry campaign. Why isn't she already gone? And that's just one inexplicable item of inexplicable behavior on the part of CBS.

I dare to seriously think this, but the possibility is shifting to probability:

CBS is conscously involved in a coordinated effort to elect John Kerry. Involvement above Rather. And Mapes et. al. know too much to be fired cold.

Abu Ghraib hurt U.S. credibility pretty badly. Understandably so. It shows we torture prisoners and sexually abuse them. The photos you haven't seen depict women and children being sexually raped.

No sense of proportion? How eager are we to protect the guys who condoned this kind of behavior? This is horrible. I cannot believe Americans are willing to wave this off. We should condemn it and fire the higher ups who allowed it to happen.

Al

You got a link for that juicy Mapes in Seattle piece? I believe you; just like to have one when I pass it on, in case someone asks me. I think it's interesting that after this apparent slime piece, she got a job with CBS. It'd also be great to collect all the evidence of her activist ways.

Sorry for misspelling "their" as "there."

What's the difference between Rathergate and Watergate?

Subpeona power.

In my previous post I meant "Heyward" not "Heywood".

My bad...

smg in dc: WTF? You mean like the sluts.com photos that the Boston Globe used as evidence. Or are there other double-secret photos you have seen that you have not released to the press.
(Or should I just leave the troll alone?)

I don't have a link - it was live radio.

jcarlson@fisherradio.com
www.kvi.com - then click John Carlson.

I don't have access to LexisNexus - the stories should be reseacrhable for 1987, yes?

An another American got his head sawed off today and you are worried about the Abu Ghraib Creep Show?

Yes, yes, I understand Caesar's Wife and moral ascendency, but, reels the mind backward (here in Boston) that you can't see that there is no moral equivilancy between loathesome American Nutbutts in uniform and a religo-political philosophy that records beheadings with pride and takes credit for the slaughter of Ossetian children.

It's a matter of values, decency and understanding the fine line between ughism and a primal scream.

Sorry to inform you all of this, but journalists and news producers alike don't lose their jobs anymore for misleading stories, nor are there any legal problems with it. On Feb 14, 2003, a verdict on handed down by the Court of Appeal of the Florida Second
District in essence said technically it is not
against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news
on a television broadcast.

The three judge panel thus reversed the previous $$425,000 jury verdict in
favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by FOX
Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be
false information concerning the widespread use of the Monsanto manufactured
rBGH hormone.

Akre and her TV producer-reporter husband Steve Wilson had prepared a
WTVT/FOX13 documentary on how Florida dairymen had been secretly injecting
the genetically engineered rBGH into their cows and how Florida supermarkets
quietly reneged on promises not to sell milk from treated cows until the
hormone gained widespread acceptance by consumers.

In their subsequent law suit the reporters charged in detail FOX Television News Corp, strongly pressured by Monsanto, with violating the state's
whistleblower act by firing the journalists for refusing to broadcast false
reports and threatening to report the station's conduct to the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC).

As Akre noted after the verdict, "the `threshold issue' the court wrote ---
and all it ruled upon --- was whether the technical qualifications for a
whistleblower claim were ever met by me. In Florida, to file such a claim,
the employer misconduct must be a violation of an adopted law, rule or
regulation. FOX argued from the first --- and repeatedly failed in front of
three different judges --- to have the case tossed out on the grounds there
is no hard, fast, and written rule against deliberate distortion of the
news.

"In essence," she adds, " the news organization owned by media baron Rupert
Murdoch, argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to even lie
or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves."

Akre recalls: " Prior to our dismissal, Station Manager Dave Boylan, a
career salesman without any roots in journalism and seemingly lacking the
devotion to serve the public interest that motivates all good investigative
reporting, had flaunted the company's wealth in an attempt to make us back
down. "We paid $3 billion for these stations," he told us on one occasion.
"We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is!"

At least Dan Rather and his producers, in their partisan zeal, merely cut the corners of verification, and not deliberately distorted news to protect an advertiser from bad press that could potentially harm children!! Which is more reckless?

And of course Jane Akre would never spin or lie to win a court case or influence the public. She is a journalist.

"merely cut the corners of verification". Is that what you call what has happened? Well, Kerry is definately your kind of guy.

"She's not the sort of person who went into journalism to report the news..."

And therein lies her biggest problem. Half the aspiring journalists I knew back in the bad old days wanted to Make A Difference. They didn't get that journalist != activist. If you really want to (first hand) help improve the lives of the poor in far-flung corners of the earth, sign up with Doctors Without Borders or Mother Theresa's nuns or something. Of course, that does involve a lot in the way of personal sacrifice and not much in the way of nice bylines and snazzy offices.

If you want to *report* the news (you know, report what it is, not manufacture it into what it SHOULD BE) by all means, go into journalism. But if your dearest friends are saying that you "don't want to report the news" you might want to reconsider your career choice.

Oh my God! I have seen the light. Bush and Fox and Darth Rove and the world corporate conspiracy ... why they are evil! Yes your right; CBS deserves a pass. I mean those guys are evil and so much worse. Its all relative, man, its really just, like, relative. You know? Its so obvious now.

SMG in DC: "The photos you haven't seen depict women and children being sexually raped."

Are you saying that U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib raped women and children? Are you saying _you_ have seen these photos? Perhaps you could fax them over to CBS News.

Or are you referring to the photos the Boston Globe ran, which turned out to be stills from some "extreme porn" video?

Burkett's lawyer, Gabe Quintanilla, said he could not immediately confirm that Tuesday.

Whoa, what happened to Van Os?????

I can't confirm that Mapes flew into a rage and fled to CBS over it, but the gist of the 1988 KIRO TV story described by Al is true. I blogged about some of the 1988 Seattle P-I coverage. I'm still trying to confirm Mapes' role.

Too late rather has already falen in and taken CBSs credibility with him just shows you that the main-stream liberal news media cant be trusted ever for the truth