Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Now Do You Understand Why You Were Fired?

Mary Mapes, the "60 Minutes II" producer who was fired from CBS News for airing a story alleging that President Bush was AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard based upon fraudulent documents, evidently still doesn't get it.

As everyone except Ms. Mapes and her erstwhile partner in slime Dan Rather have acknowledged, the documents, which were obtained from Bill Burkett, an avowed anti-Bush partisan, were almost immediately debunked as fraudulent. The debunking was based on the fact that, based upon specific and precise measurements of the typographical font used on the documents themselves, they would have to have been created on a PC running Windows software, and PCs running Windows didn't exist back in the early 1970s. Ergo, unless the Enterprise happened to visit during this period and Captain Kirk inadvertantly left behind a laptop from his antique computer collection, there is no other way than fraud to explain the creation of these documents.

Ms. Mape's lame defense:
She points out that the independent panel, whose findings led to her firing and the forced resignations of four others at CBS News, wasn't able to figure out whether the documents were real.
Don't you get it, Mary? It's not up to the panel, or anyone else, to determine whether the documents were authentic. It was up to you.

You rushed this story to air a month before the presidential elections in the hopes that it would discredit a sitting president and lead to his defeat. It was your responsibility to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the documents were true, not others to prove they were false. That others were able to do so literally within hours, that your chosen experts stated that you misquoted them in order to imply something was true that they specifically warned you was false, and that you, Dan Rather, and CBS News stonewalled instead of living up to your supposed journalistic ethics of going after the truth wherever it lay and whomever it vindicated... all of these facts were why you were fired and Dan Rather was forced to resign. "Fake, but accurate?" Come on! How about fake and inaccurate!

Now, do you get it?

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