Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post published excerpts from the first chapter of the forthcoming book by former CBS producer Mary Mapes which reveals this tidbit on what she thinks of bloggers:
“I was incredulous that the mainstream press — a group I’d been a part of for nearly twenty-five years and thought I knew — was falling for the blogs’ critiques. I was shocked at the ferocity of the attack. I was terrified at CBS’s lack of preparedness in defending us. I was furious at the unrelenting attacks on Dan. And I was helpless to do anything about any of it.”
Did Mapes believe she did anything wrong? Anything? Even a single incey wincey mistake?
“I remember staring, disheartened and angry, at one posting. ’60 Minutes is going down,’ the writer crowed exultantly. My heart started to pound. There is nothing more frightening for a reporter than the possibility of being wrong, seriously wrong. That is the reason that we checked and rechecked, argued about wording, took care to be certain that the video that accompanied the words didn’t create a new and unintended nuance. Being right, being sure, was everything. And right now, on the Internet, it appeared everything was falling apart.I had a real physical reaction as I read the angry online accounts. It was something between a panic attack, a heart attack, and a nervous breakdown. My palms were sweaty; I gulped and tried to breathe . . . The little girl in me wanted to crouch and hide behind the door and cry my eyes out.”
And about those fake memos…
“Faxing changes a document in so many ways, large and small, that analyzing a memo that had been faxed — in some cases not once, but twice — was virtually impossible. The faxing destroyed the subtle arcs and lines in the letters. The characters bled into each other. The details of how the typed characters failed to line up perfectly inside each word were lost.”
Riiiight.
And she goes on. What does she think of her critics?
“To these people, there was no such thing as unbiased mainstream reporting, certainly not when it came to criticism of the president, no matter how tepid. To them, there was Fox News and everything else — and everything else was liberal and unfair.”
And lest you believe that Mary will be out there alone battling the nay-sayers armed with nothing but her bullhorn book, Dan Rather is ready to fight too.
“Dan Rather wants to reopen the investigation into President Bush and the National Guard story that resulted in the Memogate scandal and led to his early departure from the anchor desk.
“But his bosses at CBS have forbidden him to go back at it, he said. ‘CBS News doesn’t want me to do that story,’ Rather said during an interview that aired on C-SPAN. ‘They wouldn’t let me do that story,’ he said during the shockingly frank interview with former NBC newsman Marvin Kalb . . .
“‘I believed in the story,’ Rather said. ‘The facts of the story were correct. One supporting pillar of the story, albeit an important one, one supporting pillar was brought into question,’ he said. ‘To this day, no one has proven whether it was what it purported to be or not.’”
This is what happens to you when you live in the liberal MSM bubble. Your life, your world, your reality is completely different than the rest of the regular folks out there. You’re reporting is unimpeachable. Everything else (blogs) is fallible. At the end of the day, if you believe what you’ve reported, you are right. If someone else doesn’t believe, they don’t know the facts. It goes on and on…at CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, et al.
I’ll take a pass on Mary’s book, and go read this one again.