Posted on 11/30/2004 9:42:30 AM PST by HighWheeler
Seldom in the course of a Presidential campaign does a media drama upstage the election itself, but for a short while in September, Americans tuned out politics and tuned in to "The Decline and Fall of Dan Rather."
The drama began when CBS posted forged National Guard documents on its Web site and, that same evening, an attentive "Freeper" (a regular at the conservative FreeRepublic.com Internet site) named Buckhead raised suspicions of fraud.
From there, intrepid bloggers Powerlineblog.com and Little Green Footballs, the Woodward and Bernstein of Rathergate, began to document the mounting signs of forgery.
By the next afternoon, the country was abuzz. Rather and his supporters denounced those who questioned the credibility of the anti-Bush memos as "partisan political ideological forces." Former CBS News executive Jonathan Klein infamously dismissed the truth-telling bloggers as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks." But thanks to the cyber sleuths, it was soon obvious that the memos were phony.
Rather then found himself under siege from the most unlikely of sources--other members of the mainstream media. ABC News and the Washington Post catalogued the anchor's duplicity: CBS had ignored warnings from its own experts, failed to interview relevant sources, and discarded any evidence that contradicted its preconceived anti-Bush version of events.
At one point, CBS attempted an our-evidence-is-false-but-our-attack-is-accurate defense. Rather suggested it was not he, but the President, who should answer tough questions. Eventually, CBS offered a half-hearted apology. But the damage was done. Rather's credibility was destroyed.
None of this would have happened just a few years earlier. As Glenn Reynolds, blogging host of Instapundit.com and law professor at the University of Tennessee, told one reporter, "CBS would have flashed the documents on TV for a few seconds and no one would have seen them again. Even the people with doubts would have assumed that CBS had done its legwork, as we did for years."
In the days when the establishment media had an iron grip on public discourse, it was almost impossible to challenge their biases. Dan Rather and company insisted they were simply objective observers, exemplary public servants untainted by political agenda or shoddy research. Now the public knows otherwise.
Are many bloggers politically motivated? Of course. But, unlike CBS, they are honest about it. And they must defend their opinions in a fiercely competitive marketplace of ideas.
That was rarely the case with the elite media, a closed and intellectually homogeneous priesthood whose members came to believe their opinions were Gospel truth.
This was not a complicated case: Within hours of CBS's airing of the story, some gifted amateurs in Middle-western suburbs had proven that the documents could not be genuine. CBS had enthusiastically embraced the flimsy claims that Bush had failed to live up to his National Guard duties simply because most everyone in the elite-media circle wanted to believe them.
Or, as the Los Angeles Times' editorial page pontificated: "CBS's real error was trying to prove a point that didn't need to be proved."
But as "The Decline and Fall of Dan Rather" showed, reporters who derive evidence from their political conclusions, instead of the other way around, won't have free rein anymore. Thanks to blogs and other "new" media, the prejudices of the old media princes will no longer go unquestioned.
It's about time.
I'm from the time period PRIOR to chronkite and rather.
Buckhead Ping!
No, that is the legendary Jim Robinson, the founder of this sight.
Welcome to OPEN-SOURCE journalism.
A better way to validate, test, enhance and promulgate news.
I'll bet a lot of dogs would thank Jim too, if they could talk. Before we had Free Republic upon which to release our pent up anger and frustration, our only outlet was kicking the dog and/or throwing bricks at the TeeVee Screen.
Just kidding about kicking the dog, love her too much, just barely kidding about throwing bricks at the teevee though.
HA!!
True-true.
And if one works in today's media?
...well worth remembering. ;^)
And his name forever memorialized. Now the term "rather" is used as an appropriate adjective to describe something as having been forged, faked, or lied about, as in "illegals with rathered documents in their posession."
Yo Danny, don't let the door slap you on the a** on your way out and away from the anchor chair. Unfortunately, the jerk will be working behind scenes at CBS.
I'd like to give huge kudos to Matt Drudge for this as well. He was the one that picked this up and really made the story go. If something is posted here on FR and the MSM ignores it. Most of the world doesn't know about it. If it hits Drudge it makes it much harder for the MSM to ignore it because suddently the competitive juices start flowing among them and they are in peril if they overlook it and other outlets are breaking it. I may be wrong but thats how I think the Lewinsky saga broke out as well.
Let's not forget that this isn't CBS' first questionable anti-Republican "memo."
To break Watergate into the Public Consciousness, CBS broadcast a "memo" supposedly written on official Nixon White House letterhead in which every detail of how to break in and what to take out of the psychiatrist's (for Pentagon Papers leaker Ellsberg) office.
Now really, just how credible is the thought today that Nixon had someone type up that sort of "memo" on official White House letterhead?!
CBS, did you forge Watergate, too?
According to a story now on Drudge, Dan talks to Murrow's ghost.....Maybe he knows the frequency.
...regulate the internet....
If so, we will just find another way. We have tasted freedom of speech and will continue to find ways to exercise it.
Some of you young-un's may not remember it, but this kind of discussion forum existed way before the Internet was available to the public.
It was called Fidonet (among others). Individual operators would exchange messages, computer to computer, over direct dial-up connections, which would propagate all over the country.
It might take a day or so to get a response, but it worked.
I don't think they will ever be able to unscramble this egg.
I remember telling my conservative online friends, "You've got to get a really good radio and try to find this show. You've never heard anything like it. I think his name is Rush Something."
didn't know atlanta was in the midwest. or is this just a euphemism for "flyover country" where anything west of boston is now deemed "midwest"??
Give som props to Howlin as well.
"Now really, just how credible is the thought today that Nixon had someone type up that sort of "memo" on official White House letterhead?"
CBS, did you forge Watergate, too?"
I'm sure I'm not the only one to think this but I asked a while back:
"Is anyone else starting to wonder if there ever really WAS a 'Deep Throat'?
It's Jim Robinson, the man who discovered how to capture lightning in a bottle.
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