Jackson Free Press

Editor & Publisher reports:

NEW YORK 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).

(Excerpt)—"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."