BIG MEDIA CIRCLING THE WAGONS? Here’s a Washington Post puff piece on Mary Mapes, the RatherGate CBS producer who put together a story based on obviously forged documents in the hopes of swinging the election for Kerry. Only the Post piece is rather light on the political-manipulation angle, preferring to tell us that according to friends she’s “‘funny,’ ‘smart’ and ‘very talented.'”

You’ll have to go elsewhere to learn that the talent doesn’t seem to extend to journalism:

Former employees of KIRO, the CBS affiliate in Seattle where Ms. Mapes got her start in the 1980s, agree. Some told me that the seeds of CBS’s current troubles may have been planted more than 15 years ago when Ms. Mapes was a hard-charging producer at KIRO. Before she left Seattle to become a producer at Mr. Rather’s “CBS Evening News,” Ms. Mapes produced a sensational report on a killing of a drug suspect by police that rested on the shoulders of an unreliable source whose story collapsed under cross-examination. Sound familiar?

Former colleagues of Ms. Mapes agree that she was a passionate practitioner of advocacy journalism. “She went into journalism to change society,” says former KIRO anchorwoman Susan Hutchison. “She always was very, very cause-oriented.” Lou Guzzo, a former KIRO news commentator who served as counselor to the late Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, a Democrat, says advocates in journalism are fine, “but if you’re as liberal and activist as Mary and work on the news rather than the opinion side, it creates problems.”

Yes, it does.

UPDATE: Related thoughts on journalists as activists.