Text 2508, 142 rader
Skriven 2004-09-22 05:14:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: CBS
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/22/politics/campaign/22cbs.html?ex=109651
6800&en=b019dc6604b43d52&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1

THE NEWS MEDIA 
CBS Says Producer Violated Policy by Putting Source in Touch With Kerry 
Aide
By JIM RUTENBERG and BILL CARTER

Published: September 22, 2004


BS News said yesterday that the producer of its flawed report about 
President Bush's National Guard service violated network policy by 
putting a source in touch with a top aide to Senator John Kerry.

"It is obviously against CBS News standards and those of every other 
reputable news organization to be associated with any political agenda," 
the network said in a statement.

The rebuke of the producer, Mary Mapes, also broadcast last night on 
"The CBS Evening News," served to underscore the change in Ms. Mapes's 
status in the last week.

Leading up to the report on Sept. 8, on the Wednesday edition of "60 
Minutes," about the records, records that the news division now says it 
can no longer vouch for, Ms. Mapes was one of the most respected 
producers at the network. 


 
Her reputation was burnished in the spring, after the Wednesday edition 
of "60 Minutes," then called "60 Minutes II," reported in detail the 
abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq. 

Now executives at the news division say that high regard may have poked 
a fatal hole in its checking procedures, perhaps making some news 
executives less vigilant in asking hard questions about how the producer 
obtained documents. 

Privately, network officials said they were caught off guard on Monday 
when Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry, told reporters that he 
had spoken to Bill Burkett, the source for the questionable documents, 
at the behest of Ms. Mapes. 

On Monday, the news division announced that Mr. Burkett had misled Ms. 
Mapes and Dan Rather, the network anchor who presented the report, about 
the origins of the documents.

In an interview with Mr. Rather, Mr. Burkett admitted lying about their 
provenance, saying first that they came from a former Guard officer 
overseas and then that they came by way of a mysterious couple. 

Officials of CBS News and CBS management have announced that they will 
name an independent committee to investigate how the report was prepared 
and broadcast.

Ms. Mapes, through a network spokeswoman, declined to comment. That Ms. 
Mapes is now at the center of such a lapse is hard to fathom, many 
colleagues at the network said.

"Mary Mapes has always been a first-class producer with an impressive 
body of work," said Jeff Fager, now the executive producer of the Sunday 
edition of "60 Minutes" who supervised her when he was executive 
producer of the Wednesday program. "I hope we all find out soon how this 
could have gone so horribly wrong."

For a week after the report, CBS News executives said they were 
confident about the authenticity and origins of the documents, even as 
experts stepped forward to say they could only have been produced by 
modern word processors.

Top network officials, who face questions about their roles in 
broadcasting the report, say part of that assuredness came from the 
confidence that Ms. Mapes showed in her source and the report.

Executives had reason for that confidence. 

At 48, Ms. Mapes is accomplished enough that producers for the "60 
Minutes" Wednesday edition, which is based in New York, let her work 
from home in Dallas, similar to arrangements with several top producers.

She had all the more influence as Mr. Rather's designated producer on 
the Wednesday program, where she reported to Mr. Fager until this fall, 
when Josh Howard succeeded Mr. Fager. 

Although the two editions share the name, they operate under separate 
top executives and, for the most part, maintain separate production 
teams and correspondents. 

In recent days, two correspondents for the original Sunday edition, 
Morley Safer and Steve Kroft, have said the Guard report did not live up 
to their program's standards. 

The Abu Ghraib scandal was one of several exclusives for Ms. Mapes, who 
began working for the news division in 1989, mostly as a producer for 
"The CBS Evening News."

In 1999, she secured for Mr. Rather an interview with Shawn Allen Berry, 
a white man who was convicted in the racially motivated killing of James 
Byrd Jr., whom Mr. Berry and two others dragged behind a pick-up truck 
near Jasper, Tex. 

Ms. Mapes nearly went to jail for refusing to hand over tapes of the 
interview to prosecutors. 

She also secured a major interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton after 
President Bill Clinton faced impeachment proceedings. 

Mr. Rather and CBS executives said Mr. Bush's Guard records had been 
intensely important to her, a subject she had been chasing with Mr. 
Rather off and on for five years. 

Several people at the news division, who insisted on anonymity because 
they had been told not to talk to reporters, said one important line of 
inquiry in the internal inquiry would be whether Ms. Mapes's zeal 
clouded her judgment.

Some colleagues and associates questioned whether her politics could 
have interfered. 

John Carlson, a colleague of Ms. Mapes at KIRO-TV in Seattle in the 
1980's who is now the host of a conservative radio talk show there, said 
she was "ardently liberal.''

"When I heard about this story,'' Mr. Carlson said, "I said, 'I wonder 
if that's Mary, because she was someone who, like many advocacy 
journalists, went into journalism to try to change society.' 

"She believed in what she was doing, and I think that she and other 
people at CBS would not have made the same mistakes had this story been 
about John Kerry.''

Mr. Fager, her old superviser, said the only thing he knew that drove 
Ms. Mapes was a passion to get a story and get it right.

Some colleagues expressed worry that Ms. Mapes would be a scapegoat and 
that others, like Mr. Rather; Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice 
president; and the CBS News president, Andrew Heyward, would not be held 
accountable.

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