A fierce bunch, for sure, heh heh.
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.
Your gay friend on DU failed to notice one thing. They didn't want to figure out if the documents were real. They really didn't want to even look, let alone look hard.
I thought Buckhead was from the Atlanta area?
skypilot obviously flys upside down...
Why does my "Official O'Reilly Loofah" make a buzzing noise?
Delusion at it's finest.
^^^^^^
Works for me!!
They will learn this, but they don't like it one bit. They'll still try to sneak some stuff past us.
That whole affair was very satisfying.
Cheers once again to all Freepers, for a job well done!
A fierce bunch, for sure, heh heh.
Pray for W and Our Troops
Modern conservatives need no moral justification for wanting to cover their own rear ends. Or for that matter, demanding the truth from progressives who actually claim to be telling the truth.
How cute. Rush something.....
That was a while ago wasn't it?
I'm still amazed that I have a little phone in my purse and do not have to find a phone booth, or a house telephone. Just set up a wireless mouse.
I'm still waiting on the really good robot vacuum though.
What's changed is that the MSM's viewers (I hesitate to call them 'customers') whom the mediots had always treated as passive, semi-comatose couch potatoes, identifiable only by their Nielsen rating demographic groupings, and ignored except for their buying habits and the occasional letters to the editor scribbled by little old lady pests, that audience started talking back, hear each other and be heard by the public, scrutinize the daily pap and, horror of horrors, publish their analyses. Imagine that! All those bumpkin amateurs, without advanced degrees in Journalism, that all those legendary journalists of old most certainly must have worked hard to acquire, oh, like Samuel Clemens, Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, those pyjama clad nobodies having the nerve to question the output of real, real professionals! Shocking, I tell ya! An earthquake! A paradigm shift, to use a by now meaningless favourite J-school cliche.
OK, you're forgiven! :^)
Carolyn
"The Day the Newsreader Died"...sung in American Pie mode.
The next battle should be with the bastions of higher education. They are the real threat to the American way of life today!
Besides, now he's hearing voices! Yep, he regularly speaks to, I think this is right, Edward R. Murrow, whose been gone from earth for a while. He gets stranger and stranger. Wonder who his channeler is?
You don't have anyone in your pictures wearing a nightie and bunny slippers. We are part of the corps de pajamhdeen too.
post # 100!
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