Mapes: Bloggers are to Blame --> Advantage Bloggers

60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes: "And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids!"

Veteran producer Mapes explains in her new book how anyone could confuse a thirty year old document with one written in Microsoft Office and then whoops... run a story charging the President of desertion all within weeks of the election.

--"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 [bloggers], 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."


Animated image shows the forged "1973" document overlaying the same paragraph written in Microsoft Office for Mac OS X. Image courtesy Charles Johnson - Little Green Footballs