Mary Mapes on Good Morning America
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http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Investigation/story?id=1292536
By BRIAN ROSS
Nov. 8, 2005 In her first interview since being fired, former CBS News producer Mary Mapes maintains that her controversial "60 Minutes II" story on President Bush's National Guard service was "true" and that "no one has proved that the documents were not authentic."
Mapes was fired after an independent panel found her basic reporting was "faulty."
In her interview with ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross, to be broadcast Wednesday morning on "Good Morning America," Mapes says she is unrepentant about her role. "I don't think I committed bad journalism. I really don't," she says.
Mapes says she is continuing to investigate the source of the controversial documents whose authenticity was seriously questioned by the CBS panel. She tells Ross that she had no journalistic obligation to prove the authenticity of the documents before including them in the "60 Minutes II" report. "I don't think that's the standard," she said.
From my VCR recording of the show:
ROSS: After 12 years of defending him, CBS and Dan Rather later admitted they couldn't vouch for the authenticity of the documents, Bill Burkett's documents, and that they should not have been used and the story should not have aired. Do you still think the story was true?
MAPES: The story? Absolutely.
ROSS: This seems remarkable to me that you would sit here now and say you still find that story to be up to your standards.
MAPES: I'm perfectly willing to believe those documents are forgeries if there's proof that I haven't seen.
ROSS: But isn't it the other way around? Don't you have to prove they're authentic?
MAPES: Well, I think that's what critics of the story would say. I know more now than I did then, and I think -- I think -- they have not been proved to be false yet.
ROSS: Have they proved to be authentic, though? Isn't that really what journalists do?
MAPES: No, I don't think that's the standard.
So what she really means is: "No, the standard is not on us to prove they're authentic. The standard is on critics to prove that they're not." She can take anything she wants, put it on the air, without authenticating it, without verifying it, and it's up to critics to disprove it.
ROSS: This is nothing to do with bad journalism, Mary?
MAPES: I don't think I committed bad journalism. I really don't. I don't think I've done a good job for 25 years, woke up on the morning of September 8th and decided to commit professional hari-kari.
So, this is what she calls "good jounalism" and this is how she has performed during the entire 25 years of her career. She just finally got caught.
Any thoughts?
To be honest, this kind of thing happens all the time. I think stories are aired on a daily basis that are either untrue or taken so out of context that it makes it look like something it is not. They take a interview that was over one hour long and can make it into 5 minutes of something that didn't even happen. They take little snipets or sentences and air them over and over and make it look like something terrible. Is it wrong, it sure is. Do I think it will ever change, no. Another thing that I find even more sad is the people that will believe everything they hear on the news and the truth. The most recent thing I can think of was the whole Barbara Bush thing. If you listened to the snipets on the news or read what it said on online sites, it made her look like she was laughing at the poor people from the hurricane. But, of you took the time to listen or read the entire thing, it wasn't that way at all. But boy, there were plenty of new stations and people talking bad about that one. If some of these "reporters" started getting sued for slander, things might change. But I am sure there is some first ammendment thing that would protect them.
Here's another view of Mapes from one of her neighbors...
From dallasobserver.com
Originally published by Dallas Observer 2005-11-10
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mapesgate
Before you judge former CBS-TV producer Mary Mapes, take a walk in her shoes
By Jim Schutze
Bottom line on Mary Mapes' book about the Bush National Guard documents: She says they're not fake.
Reviewing Mary Mapes' new book, Truth and Duty, in the November 2 National Review, Byron York opens with a description of the 60 Minutes II story that got her fired from CBS last year. That story said CBS had new documents shedding light on an old story--that George W. Bush had spent the Vietnam War years in a playboy unit of the National Guard and skipped out when he got bored.
"CBS aired the documents in a 60 Minutes II report on September 8, 2004, and all hell broke loose," York writes in his review. "Within hours, the papers were exposed as likely fakes, and news-division executives found themselves desperately looking for anything to support the story."
I'm an anti-Bush guy, and I know Mary Mapes a little. She's a neighbor. But I hope you'll stick with me even if you're at the other end of the spectrum. Listen, some of my favorite neighbors are pro-Bush, and they're surprisingly decent people.
One of many intriguing points in Mapes' book--a thing I shouldn't have had to be reminded of--is that the documents she and Dan Rather based their story on were never exposed as fakes. In her book due out this week from St. Martin's Press, Mapes insists that the documents are authentic.
The people who made the most adamant accusations at the time were anonymous amateurs on the Internet, not known experts. Somehow all of a sudden everybody and his blog was an expert on 40-year-old typewriters and proportional spacing.
In the book Mapes presents expert opinion and evidence that the accusation--all the stuff about typewriters, superscripts, proportional spacing and typefaces--was just wrong. She says the people who presented those arguments didn't know what they were talking about.
After dealing with the typeface issues, Mapes presents contextual evidence to show that the documents make an uncannily smooth factual mesh with other documents of known provenance. Not the sort of thing one would expect from fakes.
Another telling point to recall is that not even the high tribunal and commission set up by CBS to explore the issue was able to corroborate the accusations of fakery. For all the money CBS spent on its commission, not to mention various private detectives--and for the amount of public bloodletting the network justified on the basis of the commission's findings--you have to think they would have found a way to call those documents fake if they could have.
That was the core accusation against Mapes, Dan Rather's producer for that story: that she bought off on fake documents and fooled her superiors. If CBS could have proved the documents were fake, then all the blame would have been on Mapes and much less of it on CBS.
Certainly on the technical side of this I am not a good arbiter. And I'm not entirely neutral on Mapes herself. But I can say this much for her book: Anybody with an honest intellectual curiosity about this story will have to read the book or find some other way to confront the arguments in it. Mapes' evidence supporting the authenticity of the Bush Guard documents is compelling enough to put the ball squarely back in the court of her accusers. The case for forgery is dead in the road until it finds a way around this book.
Like I say, she's a neighbor. I don't know her well. Her husband works for a company I call the Realm of Daily Darkness, otherwise known as The Dallas Morning News. There are indications he himself may not be evil. They walk their dogs in a mile-long park, a median strip, really, in an old part of inner-city Dallas that we all tell each other is lovely and charming. I've never seen him abuse his pets.
I have no idea how our neighborhood adds up politically, red-blue-wise. From the turn of the century through the '50s, the street Mapes and her husband live on was a mainly Jewish gold coast. My street, just a block away, was sort of a middle-class Gentile chrome coast. The whole area was dope and •••••••••• hell-to-pay by the early '70s.
For a while, when the houses first were being renovated by "urban pioneers" (really bad carpenters), I think our area had sort of an ex-hippie liberal cast to it, like a pink aura. Later, especially on her street where the houses are grand old mansions, the values shot way up. The 'hood started attracting people with real money--the kind who actually can afford to replace tile roofs instead of doing the bucket brigade in the hallway thing.
So now we have all flavors--very strongly pro-Bush people, a few old hippies and many young couples with kids whose political persuasion is either very center-line or just totally unformed, depending on which day I talk with them while we walk our dogs.
We all walk our dogs. That's how I got to know Mary Mapes and her husband, Mark Wrolstad. Her mother died. She inherited a sweet old Labrador retriever. My 140-pound Weimaraner didn't like her Lab. That kind of thing.
Even though our acquaintance was very slight, it was strange to have even a passing familiarity with the human being at the center of "Rathergate." The first thing was that she and her husband disappeared from dog-walking. I was accustomed to seeing them, chatting with her, keeping an eye on the Morning News guy for any sign of pet abuse. But they evaporated.
And then she reappeared on my TV set and in my newspapers and magazines--again and again, this spectral hollow-eyed version of herself, always looking just askance from cameras as if somehow disembodied. A floating skull. In real life she's an attractive, lively woman, but on television she always looked like Banquo's Ghost getting booted out of the banquet.
Scary. And just two blocks away.
You know, sometimes I have doubts about my sensitivities. Looking back, I think I was mainly worried about the dogs. How the heck were they going to get walked?
In her living room the other day, she talked to me about what it was like to be Mary Mapes when the political hurricane made landfall in the neighborhood.
"People on the Internet put up my home address," she said. "They put up property tax information. They started calling people I had worked with at previous jobs in Seattle. People would write, 'I just drove past her house. She has dogs. It looks like no one's home.'
"We were sitting right in this room. I was probably in this chair. I looked out, and I saw this big red pickup pull up. You know, one of those Texas big-boy pickups. The window came down, and a big guy leaned out with a camera. Ching, ching, ching, taking pictures. Mark ran out. 'Hey, can I help you?' The guy sped away.
"There also were on the Internet--I found this out eventually, I wasn't even looking at it, because it was so upsetting--there were [mentions] of me having a red dot on my head, having a laser scope on my head. Which is what? Like a gun sight on my head? And if someone can lean out to shoot a picture, can they lean out and shoot me? Can they shoot into my window? What the heck is going on here?
"There was so much political hatred in the air at the time that it scared me. It scared me."
I asked her why she stopped walking her dogs.
"I used to begin every day prior to this, put on my headset, and I would walk two or three miles in the neighborhood."
She was able to enjoy three great pleasures at the same time--the dogs, the neighborhood and the news on her headset.
"When this happened, that stopped abruptly because, A, I didn't have the energy for it. B, I didn't want to hear the news because too often I was part of it, and it wasn't good. And C, I felt ashamed and hurt and embarrassed and overwhelmed.
"It was like there had been a death in my family, and it had been a very humiliating death in some ways, tragic and yet shameful."
So I asked when she started back walking the dogs.
"This all started September 8," she said. "I was fired January 10. I did a certain catatonic walk, but I wouldn't go by myself. I had Mark there to cover for me if I was unable to communicate."
So I asked when she started walking the dogs by herself.
"I would say I started walking by myself again maybe in February. Really, I had to get my confidence back."
Once she got back out there with the dogs, she said the neighborhood was a source of solace and strength.
"People were real good," she said. "Real loving."
One family sent her and her husband a gift certificate for dinner at The Grape.
"People called and said, 'How are you doing?' People sent over pumpkins and hay bales and put them in my front yard, because every year I like to do chrysanthemums and pumpkins and that stuff. I was so completely drained and felt so worthless, I couldn't do that. Friends brought over lotions and potions and soft products. It was so nice.
"They sent cards. 'Keep your chin up.' And people reminded me--and this was exactly what I needed to hear--'No one you love is sick. No one you care about is hurt. You haven't lost a family member. Everybody you love still loves you.'
"You know, very corny things, but when you're at the center of this very destructive angry thing...I mean, it was like I was caught inside a tornado, and I couldn't quite get out of it."
Hmm. So she has all good things to say about the neighborhood.
I rag on this neighborhood all the time. For one thing, many of us have lived here way too long. My wife and I moved into our house on the Chrome Coast in 1984, and we were latecomers. Our kids have all grown up together. Or not.
We are bound together by certain legal tendrils because of our status as the city's first historic district, requiring... ugh!...meetings. I sometimes think of us like an East Texas all-cousin town with ancient feuds and other issues that will only be cured by an expansion of the gene pool. But that is also what is anomalous and valuable about the neighborhood. We do know each other. We're not raw-dirt McMansion flotsam and jetsam.
I didn't say this to her, but I know: Some people in the neighborhood who are ferociously pro-Bush were thrilled to see her Guard story trashed. Some people are so anti-Bush they didn't need any additional evidence. The spectrum of political opinion is at least as broad here as it is in the rest of the country. But we all walk our dogs together.
I asked Mapes what the difference was between the universe of the blogosphere and the world of our little neighborhood. Without missing a beat she said, "The neighborhood is face to face."
I'm reading a great book: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barrie. In the section I'm on now, he's telling the story of the terrible division of America in the early 1920s between progressive urban forces and the Ku Klux Klan movement that engulfed much of rural and small-town America.
Decent Southerners like the powerful Percy family in the Mississippi Delta stood up to the Klan. One of their most effective strategies was to ridicule the Klan's penchant for secrecy, for hiding behind masks. Eventually the better impulses of Americans allowed them to see the masks and robes for what they were--emblems of cowardice.
I promise I am not asking you to change your opinion of George W. Bush. I don't even care if you still think the Guard documents are fake. None of that is the point for me.
My point is that the anonymous haters and extremists on the Internet are the Ku Klux Klan of today. They are the vile enemies of fundamental decency.
And by the way, as far as I could tell, even after all those months shut up in the house with the Morning News guy, the dogs are fine.
Thanks for that article. We read about these stories and rarely get the sense that there are real people at the core of them.
She was on Larry King Live the other night and said the exact same thing, and you know that they don't edit Larry.
Larry King also spoke with the former president of the Associated Press, Louis Boccardi, who also co-chaired the investigation into the forged documents with Thornburgh.
KING: What do you make of what Mary had to say that you can't disprove these documents are true, or whatever?
BOCCARDI: I'm not sure that it's our job to disprove it. It's a curious kind of journalism that says that if you say something, you're not responsible for proving it, other people are responsible for disproving it. That's not the kind of journalism I grew up with. She's written an angry book, and I don't think it changes -- I know it doesn't change any of the findings that Dick Thornburgh and I together made. She talked about the examiners, the experts. She said I had four and then there were two. Well, two of the four jumped off. One of them told her not to go ahead. If you do this, the morning after you do it, every document examiner in America is going to be after you. So two jumped off. And none of the four said that they could authenticate the documents because of the difficult nature of authentication.
She says the people who presented those arguments didn't know what they were talking about.
I think this makes her sound like a superior elitist liberal if there ever was one. The media consumers in this country are too stupid to know the difference and have no right to tell her that she is wrong.
In her book due out this week from St. Martin's Press, Mapes insists that the documents are authentic.
So are we to simply take her word for it?
Another telling point to recall is that not even the high tribunal and commission set up by CBS to explore the issue was able to corroborate the accusations of fakery.
This defense presents the entire procedure backwards. The objective should not have been to prove the documents FALSE, but to prove them TRUE, or authentic. If the information can't be proven to be true, then it should be assumed to be false or inaccurate. That has been the standard of journalism for decades until Mary Mapes has now spilled the beans about how stories are now written. They go to press with what they want the public to believe to be true and place the burden of proof on the critics.
Mapes' evidence supporting the authenticity of the Bush Guard documents is compelling enough to put the ball squarely back in the court of her accusers.
Okay, so I have to pay for the book and read it to find out what her evidence is of the documents' authenticity. Don't we get even a hint? Perhaps if we did, then this whole book promotion thing she's got going won't sound like so much hot air.
Some people are so anti-Bush they didn't need any additional evidence.
That's why the documents have to be proven to be false rather than authentic. She and Rather are so anti-Bush that they believe the whole guard story- just because. They believe it to be a naturally given fact, just like we all know that cigarrettes cause health problems is fact. They would bet their lives on it, and as long as the information supported their beliefs they ran with it.
I understand what the poor woman went through when she was persecuted for doing what she thought was her job. No one deserves to be harassed like she was. But she still needs to be held accountable for her part in the story debacle. That is the price anyone must pay when they play with the big dogs.
And isn't it ironic that no one who is anti-Bush hesitates to dredge up any bit of "evidence" against the man they can and use it to persecute him. And she says she never "had it in for him."
I've stayed away from this because I could not care less about Mary Mapes, but it has gone a bit beyond Mary Mapes now.
I think Mary Mapes is wrong in her overall theory. I do think journalists have a responsibility to check for the authenticity of information and material given to them, and the credibility and motives of their sources (would that Judith Miller had checked a little more thoroughly for credibility and motives). But, I suggest that it is a whole lot harder to "prove" documents of this nature to be authentic than to prove them false. It is not like carbon-dating (as is done with documents and artifacts from BC times), or testing ink or paint, as is done with artwork (and every good forger knows how to make ink and paints identical to those used by the masters, so that is also difficult).
But, overall, I don't think anything was gained and some very good journalists, including Dan Rather, lost their jobs. Which, I think, is a shame. I don't know, and no one has proven, that Dan Rather, for one, is anti-Bush. I think, instead, he and his staff had what they thought was a good story, news, and it would get them points on the Neilson scale. Unfortunately, the speed of TV news and the limitations of a half-hour for 10-15 stories plus commercials doesn't allow much time for in-depth research or fact-checking or presentation - which is a shame. Personally, I don't get my "news" from TV unless it is an immediate disaster or similar event, because most of the time what I see on TV is sound-bites, not news.
As for "anti-Bush" people dredging up any bit of evidence - well, the "pro-Bush" people do much the same (like the present criticism that those who oppose the war - especially those Democrats or "L" word people who oppose the war - are assisting the terrorists) (or, going back into the recent past, the "Swift Boat veterans" and the back and forth claims and charges around Kerry's proven and documented military history).
I have no brief for Mary Mapes defending what I think is at this point an indefensible position. But let's face it, anything about a president or high-level official is news, including National Guard history or old extramarital affairs. If people opposed to a president of one party are entitled to dig up and publicize unpleasant or unfavorable things about that president, then people opposed to another president have the same entitlement.
Frankly, I wish it would stop, and people would stick to facts rather than oft-repeated claims without much to back them up, or which are long past events and have little, if anything, to do with that person's present ability to govern or lead. Such charges serve nothing other than to demonize the "other side". In the end, we all live in the same country and have the same government, and my opinion is that demonizing the "other side" only serves to further polarize and separate us, which I think is unfortunate and unhealthy for the nation.
I grew up in Chicago during the regime of Dick Daley so I have some experience with "dirty" politics, and I am thoroughly disgusted by the underhanded, personal attack tactics of almost all parties and candidates (or their campaign staffs) in politics today.
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