STRATEGERY: BUSH CHEERS DECLINE OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA, RISE OF ALTERNATIVE PRESS

drudgereport/strategery ^ | 2/28/2006 | drudge

[Geronimo]

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX FEB 28, 2006 09:00:01 ET XXXXX

BUSH CHEERS DECLINE OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA, RISE OF ALTERNATIVE PRESS

**Exclusive**

ROVE SLAMS DAN RATHER: NOT A 'SERIOUS' REPORTER

President Bush, for the first time, is hailing the rise of the alternative media and the decline of the mainstream media, which he now says “conspired” to harm him with forged documents.

“I find it interesting that the old way of gathering the news is slowly but surely losing market share,” Bush said in an exclusive interview for the new book STRATEGERY. “It’s interesting to watch these media conglomerates try to deal with the realities of a new kind of world.”

[STRATEGERY was ranked #5 on AMAZON.COM's sales chart early Tuesday morning.]

For example, journalist Dan Rather left the anchor chair at CBS News after Internet reporters revealed he had used forged documents to criticize Bush’s military record in September 2004. The forgeries, which Bush now calls a conspiracy, ended up helping his reelection campaign, he acknowledged in the Oval Office interview.

“It looks like somebody conspired to float false documents,” the president tells author Bill Sammon. “And I was amazed about it. I just couldn’t believe that would be happening [and] then it would become the basis of a fairly substantial series of news stories.”

He added: “Then there was a backlash to it. I mean, a lot of people were angry that this could have happened. A lot of Americans are fair people and they viewed this as patently unfair. So in a funny way, I guess it inured to our benefit, when it was all said and done.”

The episode, known as “Memogate,” inoculated Bush against further scrutiny of his National Guard record for the duration of the presidential campaign.

“It also, frankly, gave us an opportunity, frequently, when things came out in the media that we didn’t believe or didn’t like, to say, ‘It’s another CBS story,’” said Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who was the president’s campaign manager. “I mean, it gave us a serious response to bad news.”

Although Memogate was initially expected to harm the president, it ended up backfiring spectacularly on the press.

“The guy that it hurt most was Dan Rather and the executives at CBS,” White House strategist Karl Rove said in an interview for STRATEGERY. “It further disgraced a network which is third in ratings and, if you look at the demographics of their consumers, it’s like 70 percent Democrat.”

Rove said Rather’s eagerness to broadcast obviously forged documents proves he is “no serious reporter.” As for Rather’s insistence, to this day, that the documents are real, Rove said: “That’s really bias.”

Memogate has helped accelerate the decline of the mainstream media, generally defined as CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times and other establishment news outlets.

“I think what’s healthy is that there’s no monopoly on the news,” Bush said. “There’s competition. There’s competition for the attention of, you know, 290 million people, or whatever it is.

“And the amazing thing about this world we live in is that there’s a kind of free-flowing, kind of bulletin board of ideas and thoughts out there in the ether space, sometimes landing on somebody’s desk and sometimes not, but always available. It’s a very interesting period.”

Having long been pilloried by the mainstream media, Bush now finds the rise of the alternative media nothing less than revolutionary.

“It’s the beginning of the twenty-first century; it also happens to be the beginning of—or near the beginning—of a revolution in newsgathering and dissemination,” he said. “Not in newsmaking—that tends to be pretty consistent.”

Rove considers Memogate a watershed in the rise of the alternative media.

“The whole incident in the fall of 2004 showed really the power of the 'blogosphere',” he said in his West Wing office.

“Because in essence you had now, an army of self-appointed experts looking over the shoulder of the mainstream media and bringing to bear enormously sophisticated skills,” he added.

Still, Rove cautioned that the Internet’s political potential has a darker side.

“There is so much ugliness and viciousness and fundamental untruths that the blogosphere transmits,” he lamented. “It also is a vehicle for ugly rumors, for scurrilous personal attacks, an avenue for the creation of urban legends which are deeply corrosive of the political system and of people’s faith in it.”

Rove said Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, were gunning for the president and trying to help his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by broadcasting the forged documents in the heat of the presidential campaign.

“From her body language and his body language, their enthusiasm for this story was in large measure fed by the belief that they were playing a constructive and perhaps determinative role in the presidential campaign,” Rove said of Mapes and Rather.

“They made a decision in this instance – I think quite prematurely and quite unfairly – to pursue a story that attacked the president,” he added. “And I thought it was, to me, one of the most incredible examples of how fundamentally unfair it was.”

Rove expressed astonishment that CBS ignored the warnings of document experts hired by the network to authenticate the National Guard memos.

“It goes back to the failure of the mainstream media, in this instance, to honor their own experts,” he said.

Rove is not the only senior Bush adviser who considers the mainstream media biased against the conservative president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was outraged that the TV networks refused to declare Bush the winner on Election Night, even after all the votes were counted in the pivotal state Ohio and it became obvious Kerry could not win.

“Some of the talking heads,” Card said, “were rooting for a crisis in Ohio. It wasn’t just that they were afraid to admit we had won.”

Card became particularly incensed when Bush’s Ohio lead reached 120,000 votes, which was mathematically insurmountable.

“Nobody wanted to call it so that we had won,” he said. “It was like, c’mon, are they just afraid to say it?”

Developing...

[BigSkyFreeper]

Even when presented with the fact that the time stamp defaults to Pacific Standard time when one is not logged on she thinks she was set up.

Mapes was duped by her own stupidity.

[FreedomFarmer]

It is somewhat akin to watching a game of Japanese Go.
Buy the paper, claim the territory.

It's being done with borrowed money for market share. Before the bill comes due, the chain is sold off to a bigger player.

The Press actually created the United States, long before the first shot was fired. It now seems content to destroy it's greatest achievement.

There will always be some kind of newspaper around, but its influence will continue to degrade.

[nightowl]

Bill Sammon's new book, "Strategery", is #3 at Amazon.com right now. I ordered mine Sunday and it will be delivered tomorrow. I Can't wait. I've purchared all of Bill Sammon's books on the President and the one about how Gore tried to steal the 2000 election. They are all great reads.

[Desparado]

I grew through my "young Man" years devouring Esquire in the 60's and 70's. It was like Playboy but without all the fold outs. But now I can't even look through it without gagging! It's turned into some kind of Gay Cosmo or something. Another great mag destroyed by the PC people.

[patj]

What are those 2 women in the middle known for?

[Buckhead]

Gotta admit, this is pretty cool.

[CedarDave]

I am thrilled that I was there on those threads that night when Buckhead, Howlin,TankerKC, and other freepers did the work of exposing those Rather/Mapes lies......an exciting night!

I was there too but a Johnny-come-lately the next morning.

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

“It looks like somebody conspired to float false documents,” the president tells author Bill Sammon. “And I was amazed about it. I just couldn’t believe that would be happening [and] then it would become the basis of a fairly substantial series of news stories.

Below is fake CBS document overlayed by Microsoft Word in default mode......courtesy Little Green Footballs..

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

..This is big Mapes...get it on the air immediately....by the way...whose Lucy Rameriz?

[foreshadowed at waco]

I loved The Third Wave...I read it in 1994 right after hearing Gingrich recommmend it on an interview show shortly after the takeover of the House...he said that as an historian and a politician it helped him understand how the world changed and how trends operate to alter the social landscape...for those who don't know we are supposedly in the midst of the 3rd wave--the communication revolution (the 1st wave was agricultural and the 2nd was industrial) which is why we are in a state of global upheaval...like the medieval world of the Middle East having to face the realities of the 21st century due to the internet and satellite technology...Toeffler was a genius IMHO...I taught 8th grade history and used the template of the 3 waves to show how societal advances led to tension and eventual conflict when the old order and the new order struggled for dominance. It really helped my kids see the big picture.

[Candor7]

You gotta luv it !!!!! Payback time.

[Tribune7]

NPR should be sold with no more tax dollars going to support its propaganda.

Ditto

[rockthecasbah]

Gee, you probably don't like Katie Couric

[RoseofTexas]

SLOWLY BUT SURELY!!

[expatpat]

where will bloggers and forums such as this one get their national and international news?

From the same place as now, the news agencies like AP, where most of the newspapers get their story.

[farlander]

WSJ, IBD. That's about it.

[RobbyS]

The Middle East is not medieval. The Christian or medieval West was entering the age as modern technology just as Islam was lapsing into late classical methods. You can get a hint of this by reading Gibbons' discussion of the end of the Byzantine Empire. The Turks in a sense recreated the Roman Empire, but because it was, like Rome, built on slavery, domination, and looting it did not welcome science and capitalism. After one last surge in the 1680s, the Ottoman retreat began and ended with its overthrow in 1919.

[Steve_Seattle]

esquire

Yes, I recall back in the 60s and 70s Esquire was an intelligent magazine, and now it's become a shallow piece of crap for girly-men. I agree entirely.

[freema]

What would be really funny would be if his FReeper name was pissant.

[Boazo]

Heh Heh,LOL

[RayChuang88]

What is happening is perhaps the greatest democratization of communications technology since the arrival of the hot-metal moveable-type printing press in 1449.

As Hugh Hewitt said in his book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World, when Johann Gutenberg invented a substantially cheaper way to produce books, it made it possible to pass human knowledge on an unpredecented scale; this made the Reformation possible in the first place. Today, the modern public Internet is doing the same thing to the MSM, and note how the MSM companies are losing money fast due to this change.