All you need to know about Tim Rutten’s incoherent piece on Rathergate is that he said this:

Unfortunately, while the 224-page Thornburgh-Boccardi report meticulously documents the details of what already is known — that CBS ignored the basic journalistic practices and its own policies to rush the segment onto the air — it adds little of value to our understanding of whether political bias was at work at any level of the process.

Anyone who is remotely familiar with the report will laugh out loud upon reading this absurd statement. Power Line has already extensively documented the new revelations in the report that tend to show that Mary Mapes had a political agenda. My favorite example:

[O]n August 31, only eight days before the 60 Minutes show aired, at a time when Smith and Mapes were desperately trying to persuade Bill Burkett to give them the anti-Bush documents that they had heard he possessed, Smith sent an email to Mapes proposing that they set up a book deal for Burkett so that he could be paid in exchange for turning over the documents:

Today I am going to send the following hypothetical scenario to a reliable, trustable editor friend of mine…

What if there was a person who might have some information that could possibly change the momentum of an election but we needed to get an ASAP book deal to help get us the information? What kinds of turnaround payment schedules are possible, keeping in mind that the book probably could not make it out until after the election.

Mapes replied: “that looks good, hypothetically speaking, of course.”

Does that prove Mapes was motivated solely, or even primarily, by political bias? Not necessarily. As I have argued, she may have been largely motivated by a desire to get the Big Story. If that desire is what caused her to lie, misrepresent, and omit key facts, I don’t see why that is so much better than lying, misrepresenting, and omitting key facts due to political bias. The result is the same.

But while these e-mails may not prove that Mapes was primarily motivated by political bias, they certainly add something of value to “our understanding of whether political bias was at work at any level of the process.”

But Rutten, in claiming the contrary, doesn’t even mention these e-mails.

Rutten isn’t necessarily trying to deceive his readers. Perhaps he read only the section of the report that specifically discussed the “political bias” issue. Because, as Power Line noted, that section inexplicably omits any discussion of the damning e-mails such as the one quoted above — choosing instead essentially to take Mapes’s and Rather’s word for it that they were not biased.

Did Tim Rutten try to fool his readers? Or did he bother to read only a small section of the Memogate report before declaring that the entire report added nothing of value to the “political bias” question? I don’t know for sure. But either way, his piece makes a stunningly misleading statement.

Was Mary Mapes politically biased, or just so full of “myopic zeal” that she ignored and distorted the facts to get the story? I don’t know for sure. But either way, her story was a travesty.