Producer Mary Mapes on Rather, Bush's Guard record, our media, and CBS

Huggington Post
Mary Mapes: In Defense of Dan Rather

....For 16 years, I produced reports for the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes II. I was the producer on Dan's team when we broke the story of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib, an investigative piece that won the Peabody last year. A few months earlier, I had been fired for my work on a report about George W. Bush's military record....I mean, talk about selective service. At the height of the Vietnam War, the future president was able to select where he served, how he served and when he served. He even got to select his departure date....(Our story) was savaged in an unprecedented outpouring of political vitriol. The Bush administration was then at the height of its ability to summon a terrifying whirlwind of criticism from right wing bloggers, hate talk radio yackers, FOX News "reporters," conservative columnists, and those hollering people whose heads always appear in little boxes on cable discussion shows. None of these critics cared anything about the facts of the story, only about their politics.

They claimed that CBS used forged documents and they repeated that lie so often that it stuck. The mainstream media picked it up, repeating bloggers' criticisms without making any serious effort to investigate the story. But then that would have required real legwork, something that very few were willing to do on this subject.

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Viacom, CBS's parent company, never did care whether the story was true or not. They just wanted rid of it. Among other things, they had multiple issues pending before the FCC and various other arms of the administration and our story was no help to the company in its quest to squeeze every last dime out of what used to be the public airwaves. Firing longtime employees in an attempt to get back into the administration's good graces was simply a business decision. It had nothing to do with journalism or the crucial role that critical reporting is supposed to play in American democracy....

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(To political types) who have treated Dan Rather as their own personal voodoo doll for decades...Dan is the personification of big media and they resent everything from his coverage of the civil rights movement to his work on Watergate. They still seethe about his attempt to get then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to answer a question during a live interview that dissolved into a shouting match in the late 1980s. To me, that was a fascinating face-off between a hardnosed reporter and an evasive politician. To his political enemies, the confrontation was further proof that Dan was a Communist....I have never seen Dan Rather behave in a cruel way. I have never heard him trash a fellow reporter at CBS in anything approaching the way he has been talked about publicly. I have seen him work his butt off in terrible conditions, stay up all night to get the facts right, and help younger, greener reporters struggling with tough stories. I have seen him give away his coat in freezing weather to someone whose teeth were chattering. He is a good guy and a great reporter, simply one of the best, as tireless and true blue as this country has ever seen....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-mapes/in-defense-of-dan-rather_b_22358.html

Some scream and scream about the journalists but when one of our best was attacked, they joined in. It is almost as sad as CBS.