Who is Mary Mapes?
As Annika's Journal notes, quoting from CBS News:
Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated.
I did a bit of reading on Mary Mapes. This is from the Wall Street Journal, dated October 4, 2004:
Former employees of KIRO, the CBS affiliate in Seattle where Ms. Mapes got her start in the 1980s, agree. Some told me that the seeds of CBS's current troubles may have been planted more than 15 years ago when Ms. Mapes was a hard-charging producer at KIRO. Before she left Seattle to become a producer at Mr. Rather's "CBS Evening News," Ms. Mapes produced a sensational report on a killing of a drug suspect by police that rested on the shoulders of an unreliable source whose story collapsed under cross-examination. Sound familiar?
Former colleagues of Ms. Mapes agree that she was a passionate practitioner of advocacy journalism. "She went into journalism to change society," says former KIRO anchorwoman Susan Hutchison. "She always was very, very cause-oriented." Lou Guzzo, a former KIRO news commentator who served as counselor to the late Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, a Democrat, says advocates in journalism are fine, "but if you're as liberal and activist as Mary and work on the news rather than the opinion side, it creates problems."
John Carlson, another news commentator at KIRO from 1986 to 1993 and now a conservative talk show host, recalls frequently arguing with Ms. Mapes after going off air. "The joke was that I'd have to debate twice at KIRO," he recalls, "once on the set and then shortly afterward with Mary."
Mr. Carlson vividly recalls how Ms. Mapes's social advocacy landed her in trouble in a major story. In the mid- and late 1980s, the Seattle police undertook a series of raids on well-known crack houses. Many dealers were minorities, and there were allegations that the police were being racially selective in the use of force.
In the winter of 1987, officers announced themselves and knocked on the door of a known Seattle drug den. They then heard some noise and forced themselves in when no one answered the door. A low-level drug dealer named Erdman Bascomb stood up with a dark, shiny object in his hand. An officer fired, Bascomb fell, and officers pounced on the "weapon": a black TV remote control. Bascomb died.
The Bascomb shooting angered many people in Seattle, and officials quickly organized an inquest. Then KIRO aired an incendiary story titled "A Shot in the Dark," in which a previously unknown witness named Wardell Fincher accused the cops involved in the raid of lying. He said he saw officers arrive at the house, burst in with no warning and shoot Bascomb, who might not have even known the intruders were cops. The story shifted to possible criminal wrongdoing by the police. Mr. Fincher was summoned to the inquest, and previous witnesses recalled. The reporter for the sensational segment was Mark Wrolstad, now a reporter with the Dallas Morning News. The producer was his wife, Mary Mapes.
Fortunately for the cops, Mr. Fincher wasn't the only one at the scene of the raid that night. A reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mike Barber, was tagging along with officers. Mr. Barber observed the officers arriving at the house, knocking, announcing themselves and then entering. He was there when the shooting happened and when the ambulances were summoned. At that point, a man "reeking of alcohol" walked out of some nearby bushes and approached him. He wanted to know what had just happened. That was Wardell Fincher. But Mr. Fincher wasn't thoroughly checked out, so all this came out after the story aired. The police were eventually cleared but it took years and an unsuccessful civil-rights lawsuit by the Bascomb family to undo the damage.
By that time, Ms. Mapes had left Seattle, and no one I talked with who worked at KIRO at the time can recall her being disciplined in any way for her mistake.
But she does - or at least did - have her defenders, according to a Washington Post article from October 4, 2004:
Publicly, Mapes has been defined, in turn, either as a spectacular producer who made a spectacular screw-up or as an overzealous journalist with a political agenda. In the main photograph of her in circulation, she appears wan, rattled. It was taken in 1999, outside a Jasper, Tex., courthouse. The sinus infection she was suffering from that day paled in comparison with a judge's threats to jail her for refusing to release transcripts of an interview.
"Mary has not been portrayed as a human being," says Jim Murphy, executive producer of "CBS Evening News With Dan Rather." "Everything from the deer-caught-in-the-headlights photo to the political operative stuff -- that's not the Mary we know."
Just months ago, Mapes was the first to obtain photographs depicting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a major coup for the network. Murphy, though he has never been her direct supervisor, knows Mapes best from the "harrowing" eight-day trip they took with Rather into Afghanistan in the days after U.S. forces entered Kabul in 2001. Murphy says she was the best kind of companion on such an assignment: capable, unruffled and able to keep the mood light, no matter the circumstance.
For veteran correspondent Vicki Mabrey, Mapes is the producer she desperately wanted to work with as a young reporter in Dallas, not to mention the expert on where to get the best tortilla soup -- or anything else, for that matter -- in town. For Bob McNamara, another veteran correspondent who still works in the CBS Dallas bureau, Mapes is the fearless journalist who went into the heart of the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict to get the story.
Rather, who long has relied on her judgment, says Mapes has his "respect" and his "friendship."
"Mary Mapes earned my trust and the trust of her colleagues with years of excellent, fearless reporting," Rather said in a statement provided to The Post. "She is tireless in pursuit of a story and she has proven herself many times."
But that woman -- described by those who have worked with her as "funny," "smart" and "very talented" -- has been silent through all of this. Far from CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street in Manhattan, Mapes has remained at her Dallas home -- her base while working on "60 Minutes" -- with her husband and 7-year-old son. She declined to be interviewed for this article through her husband, Mark Wrolstad, a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News. Wrolstad describes much of what has been said and written about his wife and her actions as "inaccuracies and mischaracterizations," but declines to go into details....
"Mary is a strong producer with the highest standards and integrity and sense of fairness," says Wrolstad. "And she's also part of a team. She has always counted on the strong leadership of her news supervisors. And everyone, I'm sure, knows that they need to address questions in the independent review. . . . Sometimes you have to wait for the right time and place to try to get people to hear the true details."...
The worst of it came when Mapes's estranged father gave an interview to John Carlson, a conservative talk show host at KVI radio in Seattle, who once worked with Mapes at television station KIRO, also in Seattle.
"I'm really ashamed of my daughter, what she's become," said Don Mapes, who had a falling-out with his daughter years ago for undisclosed reasons. "She went into journalism with an ax to grind, that is, to promote feminism -- and radical feminism, I might say -- and liberalism."
Mapes's close friend Lisa Cohen, who lives in Seattle, was horrified.
"They were throwing anybody up there," she says. "People who don't know her. Her father, whom she hasn't spoken to in 15 years, just because he shares the same last name. Anything to throw fuel on the fire."
Cohen, Flowers and Mapes all met at KIRO in the 1980s, when Mapes was a twenty-something producer trying to make her mark in the world of investigative journalism. She had grown up on a strawberry farm in Burlington, Wash., one of four sisters. She studied communications and political science at the University of Washington but never finished; instead, Wrolstad says, she started working in journalism.
Even in her early years in the business, Mapes was driven, passionate and unafraid of ruffling feathers. Cohen remembers her clashing repeatedly with the KIRO news director -- writing a scathing memo when he hired actors to play journalists in an ad for the station, bristling at publicity stunts she found journalistically distasteful.
"We had a very portly sportscaster," Cohen remembers, "and the news director thought it would be great publicity if we sent him out in a Santa Claus suit to show up live on people's doorsteps to give them one little bag of groceries. One little bag. Mary was assigned to it. She was horrified. She told him he couldn't do that, that it was unfair to these people, that they were giving them no warning, that it would embarrass them. If he was going to do something, she wanted him to do something meaningful."
To Cohen, that was classic Mapes: principled, unafraid to challenge, always willing to work harder than anyone else....
Mapes quickly gained a reputation for being dogged, fearless and fun. When Mabrey joined the bureau, the two did gospel brunches together, and argued over the death penalty: Mapes con, Mabrey pro. But Mabrey cites Mapes's coverage of a controversial death penalty case as an example of how Mapes did not allow her opinions to influence her work. "I think Mary is very fair, and I think she did not sugarcoat what Karla Fay Tucker did," Mabrey says, referring to the Texas inmate who was executed in 1998. "She would be the first one to tell you that she didn't think a person should be put to death, but she would also be the first one to tell you that these were horrible killings."...
"The bottom line is, a lot of us really like Mary and want to help her get through this," Murphy says. "If Mary did something wrong, she's going to pay for that, and she knows she's going to pay for that. But if she got caught in a crazy rush of a story and if a mistake was somehow made -- and I don't know if one was -- I hope people can understand that."
So what's the deal about this guy who shares the same last name as Mary Mapes? (I hope my daughter's friends never describe me like that. Ouch.)
But Mapes' father sees a political agenda behind his daughter's work. Don Mapes, 76, was a recent guest on a radio talk show hosted by John Carlson on KVI in Seattle.
He said, "I'm really ashamed of what my daughter has become. She's a typical liberal. She went into journalism with an ax to grind, and that was to promote radical feminism."
He confessed to being disappointed in his daughter's role in the controversy. He said, "When I heard about 60 Minutes, I suspected she would be the producer of the show."
In an interview with Talon News, Don Mapes said his suspicion was because that he believed, "Dan Rather and she have been working on this ever since Bush was elected."
In commenting on the Wednesday's 60 Minutes show, he said, "It was a farce, it was fraud. I'm sorry as a father that my daughter was the producer of it."
His fatherly instinct showed through when he said, "To give her the benefit of the doubt, I believe she has been had."
But he also chastised his daughter for being intellectually dishonest.
He said, "She ought to look closer at George Soros or Michael Moore."
However, Don was communicating by e-mail with his daughter in mid-September 2004:
But Don Mapes, her 76-year-old father, told the Daily News from Burlington, Wash., that her reputation may not save her.
"You protect yourself, I told her, because Dan Rather's not going to do anything but protect himself," said Don Mapes, who said he communicated with his estranged daughter last week by E-mail.
"She answered back: no way. She said Dan is loyal to me and my bosses are also."
In retrospect, Father Knows Best. The daughter, however, is going down fighting:
In his remarks, Moonves directed some of his sharpest disappointment at Mapes. "Her basic reporting was faulty and her responses when questioned led others who trusted her down the wrong road," Moonves said, a reference to comments she had made to supervisors, in the days leading up to the broadcast, that she could vouch for the source of the documents and their authenticity.
In a statement issued to other news organizations late Monday, Mapes said she was "shocked by the vitriolic scapegoating in Les Moonves's statement."
"I am very concerned that his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations - ratings rather than journalism," she added.
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