The Killian Memos: Will Mary Mapes Get the Last Laugh?

The problem with living in the big winger echo chamber that the national media have become is that even if you're shrewd and suspicious about everything being passed along as "news," through sheer repetition, some of it works its way into your subconscious anyway. So it seems with the story of CBS News and the Killian memos raising questions about Dubya's much-disputed service in the Texas National Guard.

You will recall that when CBS came out with documents showing that not only had Bush skated through his National Guard service, he even had left duty more than a year ahead of time once he got tired of showing up. The wingerweb erupted with a slew of attacks on the documents' authenticity, claiming that their typefaces and spacing couldn't have been accomplished with the typewriters available in the early 1970s. Though the charges were debunked, the craven retreat of CBS management in the face of the attacks and the left's unwillingness to come to the aid of a corporate media news outlet left the wingers in control of the field. They've been crowing so long and so incessantly about their triumph in exposing the "forged" documents that most conservatives and even some liberals take it for granted that CBS had been caught red-handed.

Mary Mapes, the former CBS producer who worked on the story, thinks she and her colleagues were left twisting in the wind by corporate bosses whose first thought was to appease their critics rather than support their journalists. She has a new book out called Truth and Duty that sounds like worthwhile reading. This interview with Mapes in Daily Kos certainly warrants a look:

Bloggers and many reporters in the mainstream media used these criticisms as supposed "proof" that the Killian documents were "obviously forged." They were wrong, but our best efforts at CBS to get people to slow down and realize that all of these characteristics were commonly available at the time the memos were purportedly written were knocked aside. Conservative critics just kept repeating mistakes until they'd said this long enough and loudly enough that truth no longer mattered. Bloggers on the far right badly wanted to believe the memos were "forged" and, to our great detriments, our media competitors were way too eager to play "gotcha" and show that CBS and 60 Minutes II and Dan Rather and Mary Mapes hadn't done their jobs. The media declared that the memos were false, that conservative bloggers were the new kingmakers and that the story was destroyed. The problem is that those conclusions are simply incorrect.

The new documents now on my Web site seem to have had little impact on the "freepers" or the Powerline followers. But then reality has no impact on these people. They just didn't like the content of the story and they would have used anything to try to knock it down.

Luckily for them, they hit on the issue of fonts and 30-year-old typewriter capabilities, something so mind-numbingly dull that no one cared to devote the time to seeing whether the critics' charges were true or not. I had no choice but to chase the details of their type-related criticisms — which NO mainstream reporter has bothered to follow up on — and I ultimately obtained new material from the Texas Guard, which completely debunks the critics' claims. Just as important, these new documents reveal that the true story of Bush's service in the Guard is not settled. Not by a long shot.

It must have felt like old times for Mapes when she found herself on CNN being interviewed about the book by Brent Bozell, a winger propagandist who has made a career out of screaming "liberal bias!" whenever a newspaper story or TV news item appears that's even slightly less than worshipful to Republicans.

Article Author: Steven Hart

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

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