In her first post-fiasco interview, Mary Mapes offers the following rationale for sticking to her guns:
Inside the head of one former news producer, ignorance has won the war.
They report, you decide. That’s the new (low) standard, right?
And, what about the fired Judith Miller at the New York Times who didn’t bother to do any sanity checks on her sources feeding her fictions about Saddam’s WMDs? And, what about all those Fox News producers who were fired after reporting breathlessly for the Nth time during the invasion that WMDs had apparently been found?
Oh, they weren’t fired, were they? Hell, I am not asking for repentence in these cases; I’d just settle for a little accountability!
Except that I wasn’t using it to defend Mary Mapes but merely to point out that there seems to be rather selective outrage…and selective accountability…on the issue of the media’s sloppiness.
Mary Mapes deservedly lost her job for making statements based on faulty evidence. Her current accusers might consider whether they’ve met that standard before pushing for more.
Sloppiness comes in different degrees of egregiousness. For instance, it’s one thing to be fooled by the 1983 “Hitler Diary” hoax; it’s quite another to be fooled by a supposed “Hitler Diary” that is written in English (with “th” occasionally replaced by “z”). I’d say that being fooled by the WMD claims is comparable to the former, while being fooled by the “TANG memos” is comparable to the latter.
Well, I am not so sure. Even the secretary who said that the memos are fake said that they accurately represented the viewpoints of those involved and what would likely have been in the personnel file:
Thus, it is not surprising that having heard descriptions of the documents and people involved and then being presented with these documents, the folks at CBS would conclude that they are real (which doesn’t excuse their laxness in doing more to try to authenticate them).
The analogy to Iraq would be closer if, say, the Niger documents although fake turned out to be “true” in the sense that Iraq had actually tried to buy the uranium from Niger. Or, if say, although the exact descriptions of the locations of the various weapons facilities were wrong, such facilities did actually exist. Or, if the particular aluminum tubes that Iraq bought were not being used for centrifuges but Iraq was actively building such centrifuges using other materials.
As usual, I agree with jshore. No one has shown that there was anything wrong with the story itself for which there was plenty of documentation, including testimonials from witnesses. A handful of those documents have been challenged but the story itself, that Bush got away with failing to do his duty as a Guardsman, was not. ( Of course, if the Bushies did challenge the story it might have shifted the focus of the media brouhaha to Bush’s behavior instead of the reliability of a tiny portion of the documentation. )
So far as anyone has determined, Ms Mapes’ handling of the questionable documents was completely above board. They weren’t obvious fakes. CBS News subsequently submitted them to an independent expert who authenticated them and then later recanted. If they can convince an expert I don’t see how we can blame her for being fooled, if indeed they are forgeries.
Ms Mapes has every right to be upset with CBS News for spinelessly caving into “libruhl media” pressure. That is, unless there is something significant in the provenance of the questionable documents that hasn’t been made public. She might have gotten them from a source she should have known to be unreliable or even forged them herself.
How hard can it be to determine that proportionally-spaced lettering was not produced on a typewriter found on a back-of-beyond National Guard base in 1973?
I saw a program on television once about people who specialize in being able to determine what typewriter produced any particular message.
Yes, of course the story itself was substantially true…Bush got into the National Guard because of his father, just like a lot of upper class and upper middle class people did at the time, and the people who got into the Guard weren’t expected to do very much, and George Bush probably did less than most, and like all the other youngsters in the Guard with connections he knew nothing much would come of it.
That still doesn’t mean that 60 Minutes didn’t try to use an obvious forgery to document what was obviously true. You don’t get to fabricate sources to support your story, even if your story is correct. And claiming that journalists don’t have an obligation to determine the accuracy of their sources is just mind-boggling. It’s everything that’s wrong with journalism today…get a statement from side A, a statement from side B, we report, you decide. It’s crap. And this crap sabotaged their story. Who knows–without Mapes’s stunt Bush might have lost the election.
I don’t see what that has to do with this issue.
Mapes continues TO THIS DAY to defend documents that have been shown to be forgeries. It took bloggers about 5 minutes to point out the problems with the documents.
If Fox or CNN Reports that “The Pentagon announced today that XYZ was found in Iraq…” they are reporting a fact-- that the Pentagon made an announcement. If “XYZ” turns out to be “ABC” instead, and they continue to report the “XYZ” story, insisting that all other news soruces are incorrect, then there might be a parallel.
Yep. Her “no one has proved that the documents were not authentic.” line was the real kicker – it reminded me of Criswell’s “Can you prove that it didn’t happen?” line at the end of Plan Nine From Outer Space.
People here seem to be overestimating the ease in which problems could be determined. CBS News’ lead expert didn’t reject the documents out of hand but instead spent “five to eight hours examining the memos”. While he didn’t authenticate the documents ( as I erroneously stated earlier ) he told them he could not do so because they were copies. This from an expert in the field.
Still, looking back at the news coverage it seems there were other document experts for CBS News who did raise red flags. Given those warnings, I have to conclude that I was wrong to defend Ms Mapes. She shouldn’t have included the documents in the story until the questions about them had been cleared up. Her failure to do so caught her news organization up in a firestorm of controversy and I don’t blame them for showing her the door.
So, basically I have to retract my entire post. Anyone got some pepper to spice up this serving of crow?
In completely unrelated news, Judith Miller has finally been fired from the NYT:
I was about to write a post scorching you for a dishonest and self-serving approach to this issue.
Now I find that I, in turn, must apologize for what I was thinking.
Thank you for a gesture we see all too seldom here.
What Lemur866 said. There apparently was not enough scrutiny of the documents. I believe their content is correct but in their rush to be first, they took a shortcut and compromised their integrity. To its credit, CBS authorized an independent investigation and took corrective action. Something the Bush administration would do well to emulate.
Well, harder than some bloggers wqanted to claqim, at any rate. The proportional font Selectric was already in use prior to the time in question. This limits the objection to determining when or whether an ANG office would have (or could have) obtained and used one in that year.
I certainly agree that it should have been a red flag–particularly for anyone old enough to have created documents on typewriters–but it was not the slam dunk that it has sometimes been portrayed.
Could you clarify or explain what is meant by proportional font spacing? All early typewriters would be type space limited by design. Justified text or variable space type would require some form of computer interface.