Mary Mapes is back, and she's pissed off. The CBS news producer, who was fired earlier this year following last September's disastrous "60 Minutes II" report that showed to prove -with documents later shown to be forged- that President Bush had shirked his National Guard duty in the 1970s, has written a new book and done a round of media interviews.
Her position now? The network, the investigators, the media, and (especially) the bloggers screwed her, the story was "accurate," and... the documents were real.
Now I'm not the guy who normally goes after "mainstream elite media" types for their excesses; in fact, I'm usually the guy who defends them when others do. But come on. Mapes seems to be nothing less than delusional- pretending that some kind of "cabal" brought her down, when in fact it was her own actions that caused her own downfall. And of course the documents were forged. Mapes seems to be the last person alive clinging to their authenticity. It's the journalistic equivilant of saying OJ was innocent.
Here's my message to Mary: go away. Just shut up. You're embarrassing yourself, you're embarrassing CBS, and you're embarrassing the journalism profession. You fucked up. Admit it. For every one of us journalists who tries to be honorable, truthful, unbiased, and contrite when we make a mistake, you're making our job a lot more difficult.
Damn, this is almost as embarrassing to my profession as the New York fake-fireman rapist turning out to be a frustrated ex-journalist.
Posted by Stephen Silver at November 10, 2005 07:25 PM