Mary Mapes, the CBS producer fired for her role in foisting obviously fake documents on the American public, designed to tilt a presidential election, invokes the tired ghost of Edward R. Murrow—and compares the CBS-sponsored investigation to Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist hearings: Fired Producer Links CBS Probe to McCarthy. (Hat tip: Andrew.)

When she was interviewed by the panel, Mapes said, panel member Louis D. Boccardi, retired chief executive of The Associated Press, asked whether she described herself as a liberal and whether most of her co- workers thought she was a liberal.

She said this immediately reminded her of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hearings in the 1950s where he probed whether people were Communists.

“What in the world would Edward R. Murrow think of his network now?” she asked.

She blamed CBS for staging an “upside-down, inside-out reenactment of the famous face-off between Murrow and McCarthy. At this new CBS, the journalists were the bad guys. The corporate fat cats would cloak themselves as seekers of truth. And the American public and its right to be informed? … It never came up.”

And at the bottom of this AP release, perhaps a more interesting tidbit of info, signaling serious dissent in the ranks at CBS News:

Meanwhile, veteran CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace said Monday on NBC’s “Today” show that Dan Rather should have resigned in wake of the discredited report. Rather was the report’s narrator; he stepped down as “CBS Evening News” anchor in March and is now Wallace’s colleague at “60 Minutes.”

Rather was traveling on Monday and was not immediately available for comment, a spokeswoman said.