Posted on 09/21/2004 8:50:42 PM PDT by Pikamax
CBS Says Producer Violated Policy by Putting Source in Touch With Kerry Aide By JIM RUTENBERG and BILL CARTER
Published: September 22, 2004
BS News said yesterday that the producer of its flawed report about President Bush's National Guard service violated network policy by putting a source in touch with a top aide to Senator John Kerry.
"It is obviously against CBS News standards and those of every other reputable news organization to be associated with any political agenda," the network said in a statement.
The rebuke of the producer, Mary Mapes, also broadcast last night on "The CBS Evening News," served to underscore the change in Ms. Mapes's status in the last week.
Leading up to the report on Sept. 8, on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," about the records, records that the news division now says it can no longer vouch for, Ms. Mapes was one of the most respected producers at the network.
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Her reputation was burnished in the spring, after the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," then called "60 Minutes II," reported in detail the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq.
Now executives at the news division say that high regard may have poked a fatal hole in its checking procedures, perhaps making some news executives less vigilant in asking hard questions about how the producer obtained documents.
Privately, network officials said they were caught off guard on Monday when Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry, told reporters that he had spoken to Bill Burkett, the source for the questionable documents, at the behest of Ms. Mapes.
On Monday, the news division announced that Mr. Burkett had misled Ms. Mapes and Dan Rather, the network anchor who presented the report, about the origins of the documents.
In an interview with Mr. Rather, Mr. Burkett admitted lying about their provenance, saying first that they came from a former Guard officer overseas and then that they came by way of a mysterious couple.
Officials of CBS News and CBS management have announced that they will name an independent committee to investigate how the report was prepared and broadcast.
Ms. Mapes, through a network spokeswoman, declined to comment. That Ms. Mapes is now at the center of such a lapse is hard to fathom, many colleagues at the network said.
"Mary Mapes has always been a first-class producer with an impressive body of work," said Jeff Fager, now the executive producer of the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes" who supervised her when he was executive producer of the Wednesday program. "I hope we all find out soon how this could have gone so horribly wrong."
For a week after the report, CBS News executives said they were confident about the authenticity and origins of the documents, even as experts stepped forward to say they could only have been produced by modern word processors.
Top network officials, who face questions about their roles in broadcasting the report, say part of that assuredness came from the confidence that Ms. Mapes showed in her source and the report.
Executives had reason for that confidence. At 48, Ms. Mapes is accomplished enough that producers for the "60 Minutes" Wednesday edition, which is based in New York, let her work from home in Dallas, similar to arrangements with several top producers.
She had all the more influence as Mr. Rather's designated producer on the Wednesday program, where she reported to Mr. Fager until this fall, when Josh Howard succeeded Mr. Fager.
Although the two editions share the name, they operate under separate top executives and, for the most part, maintain separate production teams and correspondents.
In recent days, two correspondents for the original Sunday edition, Morley Safer and Steve Kroft, have said the Guard report did not live up to their program's standards.
The Abu Ghraib scandal was one of several exclusives for Ms. Mapes, who began working for the news division in 1989, mostly as a producer for "The CBS Evening News."
In 1999, she secured for Mr. Rather an interview with Shawn Allen Berry, a white man who was convicted in the racially motivated killing of James Byrd Jr., whom Mr. Berry and two others dragged behind a pick-up truck near Jasper, Tex.
Ms. Mapes nearly went to jail for refusing to hand over tapes of the interview to prosecutors.
She also secured a major interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton after President Bill Clinton faced impeachment proceedings.
Mr. Rather and CBS executives said that Mr. Bush's Guard records had been intensely important to her, a subject she had been chasing with Mr. Rather off and on for five years.
Several people at the news division, who insisted on anonymity because they had been told not to talk to reporters, said one important line of inquiry in the internal inquiry would be whether Ms. Mapes's zeal clouded her judgment.
Some colleagues and associates questioned whether her politics could have interfered.
John Carlson, a colleague of Ms. Mapes at KIRO-TV in Seattle in the 1980's who is now the host of a conservative radio talk show there, said she was "ardently liberal.''
"When I heard about this story,'' Mr. Carlson said, "I said, 'I wonder if that's Mary, because she was someone who, like many advocacy journalists, went into journalism to try to change society.'
"She believed in what she was doing, and I think that she and other people at CBS would not have made the same mistakes had this story been about John Kerry.''
Mr. Fager, her old superviser, said the only thing he knew that drove Ms. Mapes was a passion to get a story and get it right.
Some colleagues expressed worry that Ms. Mapes would be a scapegoat and that others, like Mr. Rather; Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice president; and the CBS News president, Andrew Heyward, would not be held accountable.
That's funny, I think she should be dusting off her lawyer.
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!!! Oh stop it!
I say again, we could get a real war going here by sending here lots of emails saying that we believe CBS is throwing her in front of the train because she's just a girl.
My theory is that the DNC is really comprised of several camps vying for power. This operation was planned and executed by the the far left camp, which is part and parcel of the Kerry campaign. I dont think the Clintons themsleves were behind this. The lawyer Van os figures centrally in this, perhaps he was the conduit from the Kerry campaign to the dem operatives in Texas. Mapes, Rathers daughter, and probably Rather himself are in all the same Texas far left cabal.
"I say again, we could get a real war going here by sending here lots of emails saying that we believe CBS is throwing her in front of the train because she's just a girl."
LOL I like the way you think!!!!!
Not that it matters, but Mapes is from a little town in Washington state. (I'm not even sure why I'm pointing this out.)
>>>>"Mary Mapes has always been a first-class producer with an impressive body of work," said Jeff Fager, . . . "I hope we all find out soon how this could have gone so horribly wrong."
I hear OJ is still looking for the real killer too.
patent
CBS doesn't have a political agenda. Noooo! It's merely following the DNC script.
at least wait until after her verdict
Didnt know that, but I thought she had relocated also to Texas. Hell, hasnt she been working this story down there for 4-5 years?
I haven't been able to keep up on the AF Manuals aspect of this can of worms, but if what you say is true, this looks like an important smoking gun. Have you sent Drudge a note about it? Surprisingly, I fired off an email to AP about some error like this, and I must not have been alone - two days later there was a correction. They may be interested in getting it right.
I suspect she's already feeling the verdict in the pit of her stomach.
So Mapes violated ethical standards of journalism when she called the Kerry campaign. She violated "OBVIOUS" ethical standards. And she knew she was violating the standards.
It is therefore within the realm of possibility, since she knowingly violated the standards once when she called the Kerry campaign, that she would violate them further by colluding in an even more egregious and in depth way with the Kerry campaign on a story about Bush because she is a liberal and she WANTED to damage him. There is no proof of a deeper collusion but it is not unreasonable to expect Mapes to be fired because her credibility is destroyed.
Collusion!
Post #29 BTTT !!.....(good find !!)
Not sure I've seen this spelled out anywhere, but timeline sounds like Lockhart called after Burkett talked to Mapes, and before he gave her the four documents. Burkett insisted that contact with the campaign was a condition of handing over the docs. Is this timing is right, it's much more agency than co-ordination.
"A CBS producer who has refused to turn over transcripts of a videotaped interview with a defendant in the Texas dragging death case is free this weekend after posting a $2,000 bond, said a CBS spokeswoman.
The transcripts are of an interview CBS conducted with Shawn Allen Berry, the third of three defendants to be tried in the death of James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998.
CBS producer Mary Mapes, who lives in Texas and produced the interview with Berry, was ordered to hand over the videotapes Tuesday. Mapes said she did not have the tapes, and a Texas judge then issued a subpeona for CBS in New York to hand over the tapes. The judge also instructed Mapes to present herself at the prison on Friday, where, if she did not hand... "
You know what they say about a 'scorned woman'. Look for her to take others down with her.
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