SOME CALL IT “TRUTH”
The movie Truth premieres tonight at the Toronto Film Festival. The BBC includes it on its list of ones to watch.
Based on former CBS producer Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty, the film retells the Rathergate story from the perspective of Rather and Mapes. It stars Robert Redford as Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mapes. Luck might be a better name for the movie; some people have all of it.
I will consider us lucky if Power Line goes unrecognized in the movie. In the book Mapes named us among other allegedly “hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.” She proclaimed that rabid right-wing blogs had joined forces with Fox News, talk radio, and magazines like the Weekly Standard to form “a well coordinated attack machine out there in the media world, a monster that waits in the woods for an opening and then overpowers its victim.” Mapes was a perpetrator, but she portrayed herself as a victim.
The film opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 16. It opens in the Twin Cities on October 30.
The Thornburgh-Boccardi report constituting the internal investigation commissioned by CBS remains available online. Chapters VII and VIII along with Appendix 4 definitively prove Rather’s 60 Minutes segment on President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service to be fraudulent many times over. The report shows Mapes to be a voluble liar.
Hoping that Mapes would not be allowed to rewrite history, I wrote the Weekly Standard column “Second time’s a charm?” about Mapes’s book ten years ago. In 1984 Orwell gave us War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. We need a fourth apothegm to cover Mapes’s book, Truth is Lies.
The movie is a production of Mythology Entertainment. The truth, as they say, is out there somewhere.
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