Mary Mapes Hits Bloggers and MSM in Upcoming Book

By: E&P Staff Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post might have a bigger scoop than he thought. In his online column this morning, as a final, almost throwaway item, he quoted from the first chapter of the forthcoming book by former CBS producer Mary Mapes that covers, among other things, her controversial experience with the Dan Rather/Bush/National Guard ?60 Minutes? segment.

Among the excerpts: "I was incredulous that the mainstream press -- a group I'd been a part of for nearly twenty-five years and thought I knew -- was falling for the blogs' critiques. I was shocked at the ferocity of the attack. I was terrified at CBS's lack of preparedness in defending us. I was furious at the unrelenting attacks on Dan. And I was helpless to do anything about any of it."

He said he had drawn the brief excerpts from the first chapter, which had been posted (as sometimes happens with new books) at amazon.com. He also provided a link. But the link goes to a dead Amazon page. In fact, the book (which is due out on Nov. 8) seems to have disappeared completely from Amazon, except for its audio version (Mapes narrates herself).

Barnes and Noble still has the book, which is called ?Truth and Duty, ? online, with the Nov. 8 pub date (and no excerpt). The book is still featured at the site of the publisher, St. Martin's Press, which promises an excerpt--but not until pub day.

Calls to a publicist at St. Martin's have not yet been returned.

One clue in the mystery is that Kurtz writes that he had been meaning to get to this item ?for some time,? so perhaps the excerpt got pulled a few days ago. But it doesn't explain why the entire book has gone missing at Amazon.

Among the excerpts quoted by Kurtz:

-- ?And right now, on the Internet, it appeared everything was falling apart. I had a real physical reaction as I read the angry online accounts. It was something between a panic attack, a heart attack, and a nervous breakdown. My palms were sweaty; I gulped and tried to breathe. . . . The little girl in me wanted to crouch and hide behind the door and cry my eyes out."

--"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."

--"To these people, there was no such thing as unbiased mainstream reporting, certainly not when it came to criticism of the president, no matter how tepid. To them, there was Fox News and everything else -- and everything else was liberal and unfair."