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 ...
Send your comments to Peter.Wallsten@latimes.com.
The article was a damn good read.
Bump for later read (of thread)...I read what was posted of article...but will not register at LA Slimes, lol! : )
You don't have to. See post #8.
The bigger the brain, the higher the intelligence...
We have a collective brain that surpasses anything!!!
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.
ROTFLMAO!!! So true! (you forgot a few very important fields: investing, politics, aging, parenting, religion, ... to name a few and often pertinent ones, that often reporters don't have any experience with.)
/
OOPS... forgot some don't know:
* BASH == Battle Against Saddumb Hussein
/
Thanks, sweetliberty.....I hadn't known we were being called "a bastion of right-wing lunacy." Methinks that the "lunatics" were the ones who exposed the fanatical Ratherbiased liars.
I rather enjoy the company in the asylum, don't you?
If I must choose between the Ratherbiased liars and the "lunatics," I'll pick the lunies, any day!!! : )
Jim Jordan said:
"That's not to say the documents didn't deserve examination. But apparently the entire thing was cooked up by a couple of amateurs on Free Republic. The speed with which it moved was breathtaking."
Why is it breathtaking? Anybody who actually used a typewriter back in the day should have noticed right away, from looking at the documents, that they were not in Courier, and that they didn't look like anything composed in 1972. You don't need days to figure that out.
"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?
"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?"
Seglin misses the point. The MSM wouldn't have been writing these stories if there weren't real problems with the documents, as mentioned by document experts. The real story here is that it didn't even occur to anybody in the MSM to check out the veracity of the documents until freepers and bloggers noticed all the problems in the doc.
Besides, instead of worrying that our right-wing bias is a bad thing, the media should be worrying that their left-wing bias is not serving them well when it comes to finding the truth. Every MSM outlet ran huge stories about 60 Minutes' report, and not a single one even considered that the documents could be fake until the internet reports. Where's the MSM's skepticism when it comes to anti-Bush charges?
Thanks, bookmarked.
Good point, worth pursuing.
Isn’t this fun!!!
Where did those pjs come from? My wife wants some like that...
History in the making, thanks – and congratulations!
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