A chip off the ole crock

Former CBS fabulist, Mary Mapes, has received the reward of the notorious, but unincarcerated - she has a book coming out November 8. Rand Simberg provides the requisite fisking to her continued cluelessness ("peripheral spacing") and studied disingenuousness (they're called timezones, Mary), but it is worth reading the whole excerpt on Amazon to see the inner workings of the mind of an "ace" MSM newshawk.

The day after the fake National Guard papers story went on the air, Mary was spending some quality time high fiving the other drones in the hive at CBS when she got an inkling that making one up wasn't going to serve this time:

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.

The longtime reporter in me was pissed 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.

Yikes, better call Kinkos!

In retrospect, Matley was right and our story never recovered from this basic misunderstanding. Faxing changes a document in so many ways, large and small, that analyzing a memo that had been faxed---in some cases not once, but twice---was virtually impossible. The faxing destroyed the subtle arcs and lines in the letters. The characters bled into each other. The details of how the typed characters failed to line up perfectly inside each word were lost.

Er, Mary the problem wasn't that the documents were fuzzy - it was that they matched too well the default output of Microsoft Word with that pesky "peripheral spacing."

I knew what we were seeing was not a simple mistake made because of technical differences in the way the documents looked. This was something else, something new and fundamentally frightening. I had never seen this kind of response to any story. This was like rounding a corner in the woods and spotting a new creature, all venom and claws and teeth. You didn’t know what it was, but you sure knew it was out to get you.

As I watched the postings pile up and saw the words quickly become more hateful, it dawned on me that I was present at the birth of a political jihad, a movement conceived in radical conservative back rooms, given life in cyberspace, and growing by the minute.

Ruh Oh! Sounds like the VRWC to me! Pretty scary, eh kids?

There's much more of the same - poor little Mary the intrepid newshawk beset by rightwing meanies. Tres boring. On the other hand, the angst is great:

When I walked down the hall, I saw groups of people clumped together talking animatedly, then watched as they grew silent when I approached. They’d squeak out a, “Hi, Mary,” as I trudged dejectedly past. It was sort of the journalistic equivalent of having toilet paper stuck to your shoe. I can’t say that I blamed them or that I would have behaved any differently in their positions. Nothing like this had ever happened before to me or to anyone I knew of. What is journalistic etiquette for watching someone’s story and career go up in flames? Everyone knew what was going on. Everyone knew it was going very badly. No one knew what to say.

How about, "Mary, you shouldn't pull things out of your butt"?

Some people pitched in and tried to help bail the water out of our sinking ship. ... Assistant producers offered to open up Andy Rooney’s office and let us look at his collection of old typewriters.

Bwhahaha!

I was incredulous that the mainstream press---a group I’d been a part of for nearly twenty-five years and thought I knew---was falling for the blogs’ critiques.

Some things are so obvious that you can't spin em, Mary.

There's apparently lots more in this vein, but you have to wonder how she managed to fill 384 pages. After all, how many ways are there to say that Mary wouldn't recognize the truth if it bit her on her nether regions?

But wait, there's more! It turns out that Mary's mentor, that ole crock Dan Rather is out on the golf course with O.J. looking for the "real" story, since CBS won't let him do it on their nickel:

"CBS News doesn't want me to do that story. They wouldn't let me do that story," Rather said, declining to elaborate further.

Rather also expressed suspicion about bloggers' role in publicizing CBS's mistakes in the Memogate affair.

"There are some strange, and to me, still mysterious things, certainly unexplained things that happened about how it got attacked and why, even before the program was over," Rather said, adding that his network was derelict in not "knowing enough of how quickly bloggers could strike."

Dan doesn't understand timezones either, I guess.