Think you're ready for your make or break, single-question,
fifteen-minutes-of-fame trivia quiz on the year just ended?

OK, here goes: Identify the name Mary Mapes.

Give up? Mary Mapes was the CBS television news producer who got
fired in the aftermath of the forged documents scandal concerning
President Bush's time in the National Guard. That television report
helped bring to a premature end the career of veteran anchorman Dan
Rather, with whom Mapes had worked closely.

This book is to some extent Mapes's career autobiography, but
mainly it is a passionate brief in her own defense and in defense
of the story that ended her news career. Her words boil with anger
and frustration. They are also awash in self-pity.

Her basic conclusion is that the disputed documents, which seemed
to confirm that Bush got favored treatment to get into the Texas
Air National Guard and avoid active duty during the Vietnam War and
then shirked the minimal Guard duties required of him, were almost
certainly authentic. She indicts CBS and its corporate parent
Viacom for sacrificing Rather, herself and several others out of
fear of antagonizing the Bush administration. Her cast of villains
reaches high up the corporate ladder. There is a lot of blood on
the literary ceiling by this book's end.

She is furiously angry at what she describes as a "digital lynch
mob" of right-wing bloggers and pundits who went after her story
with daggers drawn within minutes of its airing on September 9,
2004. "Mean-spirited" and "bloodthirsty" are two of the milder
epithets she flings at them. And their assault, she feels, was
aided and abetted by a vindictive White House.

No one, she contends, can judge the authenticity of the crucial
documents without access to the originals --- which no one,
apparently, has actually seen, including herself and her
co-workers. But she builds a convincing circumstantial case for
their genuineness on the basis of her own extensive work
correlating them with other available records.

The "independent" panel that CBS convened to investigate the matter
was, she contends, more interested in convicting her and her
colleagues than in finding out the truth.

There is a colorful cast of characters in this Grand Guignol
melodrama, and Mapes turns many a deft phrase in characterizing
them, good and bad. Dan Rather emerges as a saintly fellow who was
unjustly defamed.

Mapes paints herself as an honest worker in the corporate vineyard
who was left twisting in the wind by a heartless management. She
overdoes it, however. All that soul-searching and sermonizing gets
in the way of her story. She also goes on the attack against the
current state of the news business in general, castigating
television news for abandoning hard-nosed investigations in favor
of fluffy infotainment (this is news?).

She takes occasional swipes at the print press too for its
eagerness to spread the flood of inaccurate and tendentious
opinions emanating from the blogosphere. The news business is going
to hell and Mary Mapes is Cassandra, watching it happen yet
powerless to do anything but denounce.

Mapes worked for CBS news for 15 years, and a secondary theme of
her book is How We Got The Big Story on several occasions unrelated
to the Bush matter. Perhaps the most powerful and memorable episode
in the entire book is its ten pages of vivid description of her
trip to Afghanistan during the first Gulf War.

Mary Mapes is one angry lady. Her book, despite its dips into
soap-opera theatrics, makes a good case that the story she dug up
was accurate and that her punishment amounted to a corporate
railroading. The Bush administration will not like it one bit, but
there is hardly anything more they can do to her now.