Buckhead speaks

Scripps Howard News Service / The Minnesota (Red) Star ^ | September 29, 2004

[presidio9]

An alert Georgia blogger nicknamed "Buckhead," along with other Internet truth seekers who followed his lead, struck a telling blow at smug, unobjective anchor Dan Rather and his CBS TV "60 Minutes II" by quickly analyzing and questioning the proportionally spaced fonts used in the so-called National Guard records of George W. Bush. "Buckhead" - a brilliant Atlanta attorney who spends many a wee hour on his computer surfing the "blogosphere" - first challenged CBS in a posting on the FreeRepublic.com Web site.

"I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old," he wrote barely four hours after Rather's Sept. 8 show unveiled its "scoop." Within minutes, truth-seekers were using their Internet superhighway to further analyze the typefaces - not known to have been used in 1972 typewriters - to reinforce my friend's suspicions and to tweak aggressive news outlets into doing some investigative reporting.

A few days later, as establishment media experts were finally weighing in against a defiant Rather (who apologized 10 days later), one exultant FreeRepublic.com groupie declared in a succinct posting: "Buckhead for the U.S. Supreme Court!"

My friend, though, is a modest man. He later reflected: "As for my part, this tsunami would, without any doubt, have happened w/o me, so it ain't no big thang. I will have a cold one tonight, though."

Yet it really is a "big thang."

As The Wall Street Journal perceptively noted in a Sept. 16 editorial, "this is potentially a big cultural moment." It underscored that the widespread challenge to Rather - to his "reporting" credibility - "means that the liberal media establishment has ceased to set the U.S. political agenda."

Is the liberal media dead? Of course not.

[JoJo Gunn]

sigh Of all times for my computer to conk out. (At the library)