--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Rather’s Blunder: The Day Old Media Died?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editorial by CK Rairden
September 13, 2004
The coverage of the presidential campaign saw an interesting turn during
the
month of August. The most damaging aspect to either candidate came from a
group of veterans called the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” But the old
media tried to ignore them and shut them out of the campaign. Enter the
new
media, a combination of the Internet blogosphere, Matt Drudge, talk radio
and Fox News. They crammed the “SwiftVets” down the collective throats of
the old media, and as they never attempted to do their jobs, they lost the
battle. The old media candidate, John F. Kerry, was so rattled that he
hid
from all media after August 9th. Kerry apparently was paralyzed with
fear,
afraid to answer the very pointed questions that emerged from the book,
“Unfit for Command,” the number one best-seller written by the SwiftVet
leader John O’Neill.
So the old media picked last week to strike back. You could just feel the
protest, ‘how dare these bloggers and Matt Drudge join talk radio and Fox
News and take over the coverage of this campaign.’ So they trotted out
old
media dinosaur Dan Rather to put these upstarts in their place. Rather
and
CBS fired up 60 Minutes II with claims of “incredible do***ents” ready to
show that President George W. Bush got special treatment in 1972 and 1973
in
the Texas National Guard.
Armed with these memos and a partisan Kerry hack named Ben Barnes, Rather
carefully laid out his case. After an interview with Barnes on the
program,
Rather emerged with “newly uncovered” memos that he believed would damage
the president’s chances at re-election. One said that a Guard official
was
"pu****ng to sugar coat" Bush's training evaluation. It was cleverly
titled
“CYA.” So clever--it almost seemed unbelievable. To some folks, it was.
For a few hours, Rather must have been on top of the old media world. It
seemed as if this had been handled so clean, and now his old media cohorts
would dispatch re****ters to demand answers from the president about his
Texas National Guard service for the umpteenth time. They would turn this
Viet Nam table upside down on the president and hammer him, freeing up
their
candidate John F. Kerry. But a funny thing happened on the way to the old
media lynching of George W. Bush.
The new media stepped in.
They quickly made Dan Rather and old media’s fading credibility the issue.
Ben Barnes’ daughter made phone calls early the next day to talk radio
stations to politely call her dad a partisan hack and a liar. She was
very
reluctant to criticize her father but came off as humble and credible
while
he came off as nothing more than a Kerry operative. Ben Barnes
credibility
was damaged beyond repair. But it shouldn’t have mattered as Dan Rather
still had those “blockbuster memos” that would damage President Bush’s
re-election hopes.
According to the LA Times, that began unraveling about 19 minutes after
the
program ended. Scott Johnson of the blog “Power Line” acted on an e-mail
sent to him from a post on a message board that questioned the legitimacy
of
the memos. Some of the members of the message board apparently began
questioning the memos less than 20 minutes after 60 Minutes II had ended.
That’s right; the humble beginning of old media’s needed comeuppance came
from an anonymous poster on a conservative message board. The claim was
simple; it seemed as if the do***ents were produced on a word processor,
not
a typewriter from 1972.
At least that’s what a poster said in a thread titled “Do***ents Suggest
Special Treatment for Bush in Guard.”
Johnson posted a link on his Power Line blog the next morning under an
entry
titled the 61st Minute. Matt Drudge quickly linked to it on the Drudge
Re****t and it exploded from there. Charles Johnson of the Little Green
Footballs blog put up an example on his blog with this explanation,
“here’s
my image where the original PDF do***ent from the CBS News site is
overlaid
on my Microsoft Word do***ent, showing the exact match of line spacing,
character spacing, and character forms.”
It was a near perfect match. Now terms like “forgeries,” and “fake
do***ents” were being thrown around.
The next twelve hours were fascinating, the new media was cru****ng every
facet of the 60 Minutes II story and Dan Rather had no clue how to react.
His “experts” were abandoning him, his credibility lay in shambles and the
best he could muster was “I stand by this story.” It would be sad if it
weren’t someone so condescending and as arrogant as Dan Rather. In less
than a day, the story had changed from questions about the president’s
National Guard service to questions about CBS and Dan Rather’s
credibility.
Old media should have seen this coming. Many of them are now far too
partisan and worse they are intellectually lazy. They are losing news
consumers to a group of people who are very creative, seem to never sleep
and run on a 5-minute news cycle.
Bloggers are a unique breed, some use humor, some simple facts, and some a
combination to cite opinion and re****t on stories. Most use the type of
critical thinking that has long been lost in the old media. That’s given
them millions of consumers and the new media has used that power well and
flexed its collective muscle in the last two months. They used their
influence to push the SwiftVets story in August and literally stopped the
Kerry camp for over a month. And now in September have derailed Dan
Rather’s
attempt to derail President Bush and have dominated the coverage of the
presidential race for the first 13 days in September.
The domination has been so staggering the question has to be asked—was Dan
Rather’s blunder the day old media died?
--
Help me remove Congressman David Dreier from office (R) San Dimas
http://www.dojak.net
|
