Pirate's Cove

cBS News and those associated with it are going to have a wee bit of a problem come November. She is going to be releasing a "tell all" book, and she probably knows where the bodies are buried for the fake Guard story.

Mapes received a mid-six-figure advance from St. Martin’s Press for "The Other Side of the Story," her memoir of the controversy that knocked Dan Rather out of the anchor chair and ended four other careers at CBS News.

According to Mapes’ eye-popping book proposal, which I obtained yesterday, she’ll rely on extensive notes and transcripts of her appearances before the Viacom-ordered investigative panel to embarrass and bludgeon her former bosses and others, including:

• CBS President and Viacom Co-President Les Moonves, the husband of "Early Show" co-host Julie Chen: "Moonves demonstrated what has been joked about for years: that everything he knows about journalism has been sexually transmitted."
• CBS News President Andrew Heyward: "The architect of the cruel game. … [When CBS News execs Betsy West and Josh Howard nearly caused Mapes to miss her deadline by injecting themselves in the notorious Guard story], they were there because Andrew didn’t want to be. Then, if something went wrong, he could blame them." Later, Mapes claims in the proposal, Heyward visited the White House and "reportedly promised a high-ranking Bush adviser that the network would ‘do better.’"
• Of the top players, only Rather – "my friend and colleague" – gets a valentine in Mapes’ outline. She recalls "Dan’s constant loyalty and phone calls when I was at my lowest points," and attributes his departure from the "Evening News" to Viacom’s eagerness to fix its Janet Jackson and Howard Stern problems with the FCC and "settle its differences with an angry and vindictive [Bush] administration."

Yesterday Heyward, who was said by a knowledgeable CBS source to be "scared s-less" by what Mapes’ book might contain, told me: "I haven’t seen the book proposal, and I have no comment on it. I don’t want to read the proposal – or the book."

Looks like she is giving Dan a pass. If I was a conspiracy theory kind of guy, I might think that there is something going on there, considering she was the fall guy for the fiasco. Oh, well, just have to wait and see.