Howard Kurtz gives what appears to be an exclusive excerpt of former CBS Producer Mary Mapes’ book, Truth and Duty, at the end of his Media Notes column, reports Editor and Publisher. Kurtz refers to the book’s first chapter being on Amazon, but it isn’t now. In fact, the book isn’t there either. I found Truth and Duty at Books-a-Million, Barnes and Noble, and Powell’s sites, but only the audio version is available on Amazon.
Editor and Publisher could not reach the St. Martin’s Press publicist to gain an explanation.
What can we expect from Mapes’ account of recent history? Naturally, she was maligned and bloggers are minions of darkness. Kurtz askes:
What about the suspect memos by that long-dead Guard official? “Faxing changes a document in so many ways, large and small, that analyzing a memo that had been faxed–in some cases not once, but twice–was virtually impossible. The faxing destroyed the subtle arcs and lines in the letters. The characters bled into each other. The details of how the typed characters failed to line up perfectly inside each word were lost.”
The problem is that three of CBS’s own document experts later said they could not have authenticated those memos, and two had warned the network about that.
