Posted on 09/12/2004 2:43:11 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
These days, CBS News anchor Dan Rather and his colleagues at the network's magazine program "60 Minutes II" are enduring an unusual wave of second-guessing by some of the public and fellow journalists.
For that, they can thank "Buckhead."
It was a late-night blog posting by this mystery Netizen that first questioned the validity of documents Rather cited Wednesday as proof that George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard duty more than 30 years ago.
Buckhead refuses to further identify himself, other than dropping hints that he is a male who lives on the East Coast preferring to proclaim that the scramble to verify the contentions in his posting marks an extraordinary achievement for a medium that has operated more as an underground world of ideological venting than a source of legitimate news.
But Buckhead is vehement about one thing: He acted alone when he posted, to the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, what was widely believed to be the first allegation that the CBS report relied on documents that could have been forged.
"Absolutely, positively, on my own, sitting at my computer in my bedroom just before midnight but not in my pajamas," he wrote in an e-mail exchange with The Times. "But once I posted the comment to Free Republic I was no longer working alone, and that is the real point of the story about the story about the story."
That story began Wednesday, 19 minutes after the "60 Minutes II" broadcast began, when another FreeRepublic poster, TankerKC, noted that the documents were "not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF
. Can we get a copy of those memos?"
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
No thread posted that is not vetted and sourced, if posts are proven false, we ourselves zot them instantly.
Freepers and RW bloggers know the value of truth and veracity, dems and MSM have long since abandoned such ideals.
Thanks kc. Bookmarked that one. MRN
In Georgia maybe?
There are other places? When did this happen?
bttt!
The first time? FReepers having been keeping the MSM honest for over seven years.
"The mainstream press is having to follow them," said Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston. "The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?
We are no more anonymous than the people who write for the newspapers but Jeffrey Seglin doesn't seem to be complaining about them. I guess he prefers the blow-dried look of a television anchor for his daily intake of news.
"And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate, but because there's been so much reporting about what's being reported, it has already taken on a life of its own?"
The same thing that's been happening for the past 50 years when the MSM makes a mistake and their correction in the last 30 seconds of a broadcast goes unnoticed by the public.
How many full-time reporters does CBS employ? A few hundred? They don't realize that FR, in a very distributed and part time basis, has far more investigative person-hours per week contributing than CBS, NBC, and ABC put together
I'll have them know I'm a professional amateur!!! HMPH!!!
Carlo, got any Main Stream Media Cooked Goose leftovers?? They need some to go with their whine.
Buckhead could very well be Karl Rove and "he" could be Barbara Bush or Queen Elizabeth II for all we know.
The bottom line, however, was that Buckhead's contribution had nothing to do with spin. Buckhead's contribution was providing cold, hard technological facts about a rather obscure topic, namely,1970's typing technology.
When the Mainstream Media journalists speak of "amateurs" on FreeRepublic, they should consider that fact that, for any particular topic that they choose to write about, they are the ones that are rank amateurs in comparison to FreeRepublic as a whole.
On the other hand, on any given topic, be it computer science, typing, aviation, any branch of the military services, medicine, law, engineering, you name it, FreeRepublic can come up with a dozen members who have been working in those fields for decades.
No human being in the world, especially a reporter, is ever going to have a greater breath of knowledge than the FreeRepublic collective.
Resistance is futile.
Quick! Somebody notify Dan Rather. < /sarcasm >
Which is why Hillary wants to install a gatekeeper on the internet. Heaven help us if she ever gets the chance.
Good show.
LOL! That gives me an image of Kerry looking like a cartoon mouse that has just temporarily escaped the cat, sitting breathless against the wall with sweat pouring off of him, and wiping his brow, going "whew!" but the cat is about to smoke him out again.
When ti comes from the MSM and the likes of the LA Times the worst the insult the higher the compliment.
Liberals are terrified at the thought of being held accountable for anything they say or do.With the NewMedia they feel their power over the unwashed masses slipping .
They can no longer force feed the people with their yellow journalistic propaganda. A crack has formed in the base of their ivory towers.
It's not the fantasies and speculations found in the Newmedia that frightens them, rather, [pun intended] it's the gems of real truth.
Can't you just smell the fear.
Did anyone read the "editors note" at the beginning?
Those "people" sure are digging a DEEP hole to try to save Dan's arse!
So we may actually have generic FReepers....and trolls?
I doubt that Dan has ever been on the Internet (or even heard of it for that matter).
Yuck, yuck.
You don't win games playing on the defensive.
Thought Kerry was a great sportsman.
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