Mary Mapes: It Was Those 'Vicious Bloggers'

Denial is a river that runs wide and strong through former C-BS producer Mary Mapes. She lashed out at the 'vicious bloggers' who unmasked her forged documents:

Fired CBS "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes is still blaming the internet for ending her media career prematurely - or more precisely; the "vicious" bloggers who discovered that documents she unearthed in a bid to trash President Bush's National Guard service were forgeries.

"The criticism that was launched at us initially really came from the very conservative blogosphere, folks who are on these very conservative web sites," Mapes complained Friday on WVMT Vermont's "Charlie & Ernie" radio show.

"This was really a terribly vicious attack they launched on CBS," she insisted, before lamenting: "Politics is not necessarily the way it was when we all grew up, where you might disagree on something but you wouldn't eviscerate someone."

Mapes says that she was a victim of a new standard in journalism where "the truth doesn't matter" but instead it's "the perception of truth that matters."

"What happened to me, I think, and to all of us at CBS, was that the perception of truth became that these documents were not real; that there were flaws in the typeface and all kinds of sort of dry and extremely dull details about proportional spacing and superscript and all that."

Mapes said that she still believes the documents cited in the "60 Minutes II" broadcast by her boss, Dan Rather, were authentic, saying; "I feel that if they had been forged there would have been a flaw. And I have not been able to find the flaw."

I personally have Mary, Dan and gang to thank for my start in blogging. My first post was about the Rathergate matter.

Perhaps Mary should revisit Little Green Footballs and Powerline to get the information she needs to confirm the forged nature of her documents. It's really not that tough.