Thursday, January 13, 2005

Mary Mapes a CBS Scapegoat?

Little publicized in the "Memogate" mediastorm is CBS producer Mary Mapes response to the independent panel report that precipitated her firing. In it, Mapes presents an honorable defense of her journalism at "60 Minutes" and suggests that the higher ups at CBS may have colluded with the authors of the report to engineer her demise. She points out that "the panel did not conclude that these documents are false. . . all that the panel did conclude was that there were many red flags that counseled against going to air quickly." And Mapes had nothing to do with deciding when to air the "60 Minutes" story. That was a decision made by her superiors, including CBS News President Andrew Heyward, one of the survivors of this week's purge.

UPDATE: The three staffers who CBS asked to resign -- executive producer Josh Howard, his top deputy Mary Murphy, and CBS News senior vice president Betsy West -- have declined to actually tender their resignations. Meanwhile, top executive Andrew Heyward takes heat for not taking more heat.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice shill burnie. What Mapes fails to mention in her thin defense is why she arranged for her Texas source on the story to talk to a top aide in John Kerry's campaign --- a serious lapse in journalistic ethics, but no word on it from Mary.

Anonymous said...

I have to agree. She'd have been a lot more credible if she hadn't been trying to let Lockhart know what was going on. She's a liberal who got caught putting her spin on news in the most reprehensible way. There was no witch hunt, the witches stuck out like a sore thumb. CBS is just as slick, however, using their own attorneys to investigate the problem. Of course, the attorneys stopped just short enough to be able to defend in a libel suit, if one pops up.