Let the self-congratulating continue!
In today's Washington Post, Howard Kurtz writes about how wonderful and exemplary Mary Mapes thinks she is:
(the link is to a subscribed site, so I will type it out from my copy of today's paper)
Investigative reporters are, by their nature, dogged, tenacious, and deeply suspicious, crashing through official roadblocks as they chase the most elusive stories.
Some of them continue that quest long after their support evaporates, their evidence crumbles and even their employers abandon them.
The article continues, citing Mary Mapes' stubborn refusal to abandon her claims that the Bush Guard memos are real. This is my favorite part:
Mary Mapes, the CBS producer fired over the journalistic fiasco... [defends] her work more than a year after it was widely discredited. Dan Rather may have apologized for the story, an independent panel may have denounced it, and CBS News may have criticized her "disregard for journalistic standards," but Mapes argues in her new book that the critics are politically motivated, cowardly, or just plain wrong.
Her book, "Truth and Duty" has been on shelves for a while, I guess. But the opinions expressed in the book are all too timely.
We, the American public, were wrong. Microsoft Word was wrong, too, since they recreated a font and pagination style (superscript? proportional spacing?) that were so obviously in use on IBM Selectric typewriters from the early 70's.
Mapes did not lose faith in her story even after her key source, former National Guardsman Bill Burkett, admitted lying to her about where he obtained the disputed documents. Nor was she swayed by criticism from some of the document experts hired by CBS to vet the papers... Instead, Mapes continues to argue that the "60 Minutes II" segment was "well researched and well documented" and that CBS and its corporate parent , Viacom, caved to pressure by abandoning her and the story.
But she was so obviously right.
According to Kurtz, Mapes did some deep self-examination when she wrote her book about the Bush memo fiasco... and her self-examination discovered that she was right all along. Wow, great insights. You can tell she did a lot of soul-searching on that one.
For some people (on JU and the Washington Post), this story never dies. For Mary Mapes, apparently she thinks people want to hear her side of the story.
"Flying Fearlessly in the Face of Facts" should have been the title to her memoir.