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I see that Mary Mapes, of the CBS Rathergate fame has published a book, Duty and Truth. You can read Chapter One on Amazon's web site.
It was another day of exhausted exultation. I got congratulatory e-mails, phone calls, and pats on the back. Other reporters called repeatedly as they worked to catch up to my story. I was thrilled.All that changed about 11:00 a.m., when I first started hearing rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far right Web sites were saying that the documents had been forged.
I was incredulous. That couldn’t be possible. Even on the morning the story aired, when we showed the president’s people the memos, the White House hadn’t attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.
Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators---or whatever they were---were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.
Peripheral spacing? It’s was proportional spacing. Has she learned so little?
I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name “Buckhead,†set the tone for what was to come.There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.
This is the incredulous part. She complains that no one took seriously what the documents said. Mary, if they’re fake, what difference does it make what they say? If someone tries to pass a forged check, who cares how much the check is for. It’s bogus. You might only check the amount for ha-ha’s.
People from around the country, especially those with a harsh political bent, began chiming in on the sites with accounts of their own experience with typewriters in the 1970s. Someone claimed to remember that electric typewriters at the time did not do “superscripts,†a small “th†or “st†or some such abbreviation that was lifted higher on the line than the other letters. This was important, because in the Killian memos, the 111th was sometime typed as the 111th, something that drove the bloggers wild. Another person claimed there was no peripheral spacing on old typewriters, even though there had been on some of the old official documents.I remember staring, disheartened and angry, at one posting. “60 Minutes is going down,†the writer crowed exultantly.
My heart started to pound. There is nothing more frightening for a reporter than the possibility of being wrong, seriously wrong. That is the reason that we checked and rechecked, argued about wording, took care to be certain that the video that accompanied the words didn’t create a new and unintended nuance. Being right, being sure, was everything. And right now, on the Internet, it appeared everything was falling apart.
I had a real physical reaction as I read the angry online accounts. It was something between a panic attack, a heart attack, and a nervous breakdown. My palms were sweaty; I gulped and tried to breathe. My heart was pounding like I had become a cartoon character whose heart outline pushes out the front of her shirt with each beat. The little girl in me wanted to crouch and hide behind the door and cry my eyes out.
I thought today’s women were men and they didn’t cry. This is not a good line for women’s liberation. The little girl in you wanted to crouch and hide behind the door and cry your eyes out?
The longtime reporter in me was p***d off ... and I hung on to her strength and certainty for dear life. I had never been fundamentally wrong, never been fooled, never been under this kind of attack. I resolved to fight back.
In my world I tend to lump people into winners and losers. It’s not
that winners don’t make mistakes. They certainly do. But winners will admit they screwed up and vow not to make those mistakes again. They learn and move forward
Losers, when the screw up, blame someone else. They don’t learn from mistakes because the mistakes are never their fault. I think Mary needs to move herself into the winner group, but she first needs to admit she screwed up.
I’m not holding my breath.
Posted by The Vorlon at September 27, 2005 7:41 PM