Wednesday, November 16, 2005

''Former CBS Producer Mary Mapes on Air America Tonight''

"Former CBS producer Mary Mapes will be on Air America Radio's Majority Report today. I'll be putting up a review of her book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power sometime in the next few days, but short version: it's definitely worth a read.
(Mapes also helped break the Abu Ghraib story, which earned her the wrath of a great many administration supporters.)

In any event, Air America might be worth a listen tonight. The implications of much of what she has written -- and I'm not speaking strictly about the controversial memos, but about the backstories, follow-up investigations, her work to break the Abu Ghraib story, the inside look at CBS during the period in question, etc. -- are messages which should reverberate throughout the media and blogs.

Specifically towards the story of Bush's National Guard service itself, it will be interesting to see how the media treats the reemergence of this story at this particular point in time. The mainstream media has revisited the National Guard story sporadically over the years; there simply is no issue, at this point, that Bush obtained a National Guard slot through political influence, that he left the Guard without fulfilling the obligations required of him, and that the most relevant portion of Bush's Guard records somehow managed to "disappear" from the archives before Bush's presidential bid. Right now, the press is increasingly turning on Bush, as Bush's own behaviors seem, shall we say, less than presidential; it might be interesting to see if this substory gains additional traction as part and parcel of the rapidly coalescing conventional wisdom of the man."-excerpted from Hunter's post on Kos. "Majority Report" no longer airs live in Seattle on AM1090, but is available here online, 4-7pm Pacific Time.

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