09/10/2004 Entry: ""
Posted by Maynard @ 09:59 AM MST
Observations on the CBS Forgery Kerfuffle
Background: PowerLine Blog vs. CBS News.
This story will go down in blogging history as an old-school-vs.-new-kids-on-the-block battle. It is like the Hiryu vs. the Arizona, or the Virginia vs. the Cumberland. On the one hand you had the new technology, on the other hand was the old way of doing things. The primary lessons are twofold: (a) unless you adapt to new ways of doing things, you stagnate, and (b) verify, verify, verify.
CBS took a gut shot with this one. A story was put forth and within one news cycle of its broadcast was discredited on the same basis by which it was originally hailed. The speed with which the background work was done trumped the credit automatically assumed among fraternal journalists. The Establishment Media broke the first Moscow Rule and fell flat on their face.
The only way CBS can save any face is for Dan Rather to lead the investigation into it and fall on his own journalistic pen if need be. He needs to apologize to America on the next episode of the CBS Evening News. If he ends up being implicated in the origination of the documents he needs to be fired without pension. I doubt that he was involved, though. I get the feeling he was merely duped.
The media needs to admit that partisan amateurs outfoxed their professional standards. My sense is that biased bitterness towards President Bush clouded the judgment of the professional journalists in this endeavor. As such they gave more weight to the documents than they should have. The partisan amateurs of the Blogosphere allowed their perspective to color their judgments - not a bad thing - and they found the scoop. Journalism needs to change. Journalists need to realize that partisanship need not be vilified but instead embraced - and proclaimed loudly. If they are left-leaning, then say so. If they are right-leaning, then say so. But tell us, the audience, so that we can decide what filter needs to be used to interpret the reports. Do not presume that your own filter of Journalistic Standards if fail-safe or foolproof.
There are several Sherlock Holmes awards to hand out for this one.
Holmes: Buckhead the commentator on Free Republic. It was his observation that started it all, and he noticed it before anyone else did.
Lestrade: Powerline for taking the clue and running with it.
Watson: Charles for his Word-by-Word duplication. He makes the obvious but necessary point, much as the doctoral sidekick in the stories would often do.
Moriarity: I'm reserving judgment on this one. The obvious candidate is Dan Rather, for putting out such a quickly identified fraud. But that is shallow analysis, and it assumes the worst about him. No, the one who deserves this award is the one who created the fraud; as yet still unidentified. But there are leads being followed. As yesterday, follow the rules: Assume Nothing.
Two more awards, but not Sherlockian ones: Aaron Brown of CNN gets the ostrich award for last night's show. He mentioned the Weekly Standard post about the subject but then launched straight into the prepared story on the documents - which was based on the presumption they were real. And the comedian award goes to The Commissar for his "original document".
Watching this story break has been fun. I had the smallest of parts to play in it myself - I submitted a set of links to Drudge via his "anonymity guaranteed" submission box on his front page, but there's no telling how many others did the same. But, shortly after I submitted the links, he had a "DEVELOPING" headliner at the top of his page. I'll find out for sure in Heaven but in the meantime, I can dream.
As I read the various postings I was dismayed at the tendency to abbreviate "Main Stream Media" as "MSM" (my middle name is Scott). As a personal favor, please don't refer to the Main Stream Media as such. I prefer Dinosaur Media, if you must deride their slow news cycle as compared to the Blogosphere.
The new media is here to stay and will be doing more of this in the future. Stay tuned.
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