Mary Mapes
From dKosopedia
Mary Mapes was a producer for the television show 60 Minutes. She is known for having broken the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and for encouraging 60 Minutes to use documents of dubious authenticity which were attributed to National Guard officer Jerry Killian to back up CBS' claims about President George W. Bush's military service records (see Killian documents).
Mary was terminated by CBS on January 10, 2005 following a CBS internal two-person panel, former governor of Pennsylvania and United States Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and retired president and chief executive officer and former executive editor of the Associated Press Louis Boccardi, into the memo scandal, which was subsequently dubbed, "Memogate." Also 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.
Mary, the producer of the piece, was also faulted for calling Joe Lockhart, a senior official in the John Kerry campaign, prior to the airing of the piece, and offering to put Bill Burkett in touch with him. The panel called Mapes’ action a "clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias.”
Mapes herself has denied any major wrongdoing. She said that the authenticity of the documents had been corroborated by an unnamed key source and that journalists often have to rely on photo-copied documents as the basis for verifying a story. At the same time, she suggested that she would have preferred to do more work on the story, but that her superiors, including CBS News president Andrew Heyward, pushed for the story to be aired already on September 8.
Mary Mapes grew up with four sisters in Burlington, Washington where her family had lived for generations. She graduated from Burlington-Edison High School in 1974 and studied communications and political science at the University of Washington. In the 1980s she worked at the KIRO-TV in Seattle. There she also met her husband Mark Wrolstad when she was a producer and he was a reporter. They married in 1987.
She went to work for CBS News in Dallas in 1989 and joined "60 Minutes Wednesday" in 1999, working exclusively as a producer assigned to Dan Rather.
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External links
- CBS 'Rathergate' Producer Under Pressure from Network by Jeff Gannon
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