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The entire thing totally torques me off.

When I was a reporter, that's what I was a reporter and anchor (I was in radio) I never used the terminology of "journalist." Just because they are in DC or NY or LA really doesn't make any of them any better than what I was. In fact, I was more of a "journalist" than the majority of the current crop.

The majority of them disgust me.

I've got an early morning "get-up" call, so I will wish you all a fond good night - and I will FReep at you on the morrow (or later today, depending upon your time zone)

9/17/2004 11:19:37 AM

From STEVE LOVELADY, managing editor, CJR's Campaign Desk: I can't answer Tim Graham's question [below] as to why Romenesko hasn't received more letters about the CBS furor, but Graham has truly been visiting another planet if he thinks the press has been an absent party to the controversy, or that CBS is being given any kind of pass by its competitors.

Not hardly, what with the Washington Post, Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and ABC News, plus half the blogosphere, swarming all over Rather like hungry wasps. If nothing else, that phenomenon ought to be reassuring to those benighted souls who imagine that "the press" is some sort of ominous monolithic force. To the contrary, the press has a distinguished (or disgraceful, depending on how you look at it) record of turning cannibalistic whenever one of its own wobbles or goes down on one knee.

As to the import of the matter -- if the documents, forged or not, had actually broken new ground, then this might be "one of the biggest media stories in recent memory," as one impassioned e-mailer declared to me. But they didn't; they're not nearly as incriminating as the Ben Barnes interview that preceded them, or the flurry of reporting last winter and spring on the still un-explained Alabama Absence of young George Bush.

As Michael Kinsley puzzled in the Los Angeles Times, if CBS indeed turns out to have been conned, the question is -- why? †Why rush to print, as it were, with dubious documents that allege no more than is already known ?

And as for a relative ranking of "big media stories of recent memory" -- is the CBS episode of the magnitude of, say, Jayson Blair deceiving the readers of the New York Times not once, but dozens of times, month after month? Or as big as Jack Kelly deceiving the readers of USA Today not once, but apparently hundreds of times for years on end? Or as big as the systemic failure of the mainstream press to question the fatally flawed rationale for war in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq? Or even as big as the press's inexplicable delay before it finally began investigating the veracity, or lack thereof, of the charges leveled at John Kerry by the swift boat veterans?

Rather is a visible target, as high-visibility as they come, so it's inevitable that the wolves, both inside and outside of the media, begin to salivate as they circle. And if he was conned, that's damaging -- as damaging as, say, Tailgate was to CNN a few years back, or as NBC's rigged explosion of a General Motors car was a few years before that.

But come on, guys -- try to get a grip. It's not Watergate. It's not even Rathergate. So far, it's no more than Fontgate.