Poor Deluded GirlMary Mapes has the first chapter of
her book up on Amazon. It's typical of the Ra
thergate defense: Loaded with errors, some so obvious that it seems clear that she's trying obfuscation:
All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators---or whatever they were---were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.The rapidity issue (which Moron Marvin Kalb raised in his interview with Rather) is hilarious. If we accept that there were "long treatises in minutes" (which is of course ridiculous), then there are two possibilities here:
1. The blogs were able to do this quickly because the people behind them are really smart and quick.
2. The blogs were able to do this quickly because the documents were phony and the bloggers were behind it and had their "treatises" all ready to go.
Take your pick, Ms Mapes.
And the "peripheral spacing" bit... how could she possibly get "proportional spacing" wrong? One would think that even if she hadn't known the term beforehand, she'd know about it after it caused her firing.
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.You are so, so careful about being right, Ms Mapes, but somehow you call it "peripheral spacing"?
Also, note this little circumlocution:
I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name “Buckhead,” set the tone for what was to come.Note the "I was told" beginning to the first sentence. In fact, Buckhead, who lives in Atlanta, put up his post a few hours
after the show ended. Ms Mapes obviously knows this, so she writes "I was told" at the front to make a false statement true. "I was told the moon is made of green cheese" is a true statement, but "the moon is made of green cheese" is false. That's far too cleverly written to be unintentional.
There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.Yes, indeed, it was enough.
