Feature

Target: Mapes

Was this thought in Mapes’s mind as she was working on the Bush story? Consider this: In an interview he conducted for the never-aired segment, Dan Rather quizzed Hackworth on his views about the documents. “I have been in exactly this kind of situation that the good colonel who’s given us these memos for records has been in,” Hackworth tells Rather. “When I returned from Vietnam on my first tour, I ended up in the Pentagon . . . So as a result, my phone was constantly ringing, Dan, [with] senators, [with] members of the House of Representatives, [with] generals saying, ‘We want Willy not to go to the umpty-ump infantry division. We want him to go to Alaska or to some lifeguard job in Hawaii.’ ” It was not just the president the documents nailed, it was the military itself.

There was one other point that’s worth considering about the Bush documents. Much has been made since CBS aired its ill-fated show of the source of the Bush documents. Mapes’s source, a former Texas Air National Guard colonel named Bill Burkett, had been retailing various stories of Bush’s National Guard service for years, telling news outlets that he had seen officers of the Texas Guard “scrubbing” Bush’s file of questionable material. Burkett’s own experience with the Guard had ended badly, with Burkett reportedly remaining bitter at the Guard over medical bills he believed the military should have covered.

And yet, if to the outsider Burkett—who has since admitted to lying about his own source for the documents, and retired to his ranch in Baird, Texas—seems like a suspect and self-interested source, it might be precisely the hallmark of Mapes’s work at CBS that she was willing to trust sources even less reliable than him. Mapes had procured the stunning Iraq stories precisely by trusting sources who were anything but unimpeachable. All of the soldiers involved in the Iraq stories had, to put it bluntly, a vested interest in staying out of prison. All were charged by the military with serious and even repellent crimes. Even Bill Lawson, perhaps the least compromised of the Abu Ghraib sources, is likely to give the hearer pause when he asks, “Is this really the story of seven guys and gals who took some photographs and maybe slapped a few people around?” If CBS’s claims to have an “unimpeachable” source for the documents now seem, after countless repetition and final disavowal, like the punch line to a joke, it’s hard to know exactly how many of Mapes’s sources for the Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca stories would have passed anything like the kind of scrutiny that has now been brought to bear on Burkett.

Unfortunately, in the new world of media, they might have to. Unlike other recent media scandals—Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, USA Today’s Jack Kelly—in which star reporters spent years weaving fake narratives out of whole cloth, the CBS document mess rests ultimately on a mistake, a source who lied, danger signs that were foolishly ignored. Thanks, however, in no small part to CBS’s uniquely favored position as conservatives’ most-hated network, and Dan Rather’s even more distinctive claim to being the right’s most-hated newscaster and unquestionably the oddest duck of the three network anchors, the fact that it is a mistake at the root of the scandal has given CBS not an ounce of reprieve. Which is too bad for Rather and CBS, but maybe worse for investigative reporting. If it has taught the public anything, it might be that the new standard for the media is one in which mistakes are as bad as lies. It is a standard that investigative reporting might find ever harder to live up to, until it is finally swept off the field by the ever-rising tide of commentary, risk-free and mistake-proof.