Rathergate

It's been interesting to follow the whole CBS/Dan Rather hoo-ha. Jeff Jarvis has posted an excellent résumé on his blog. The analysis and timeline that Ernest Miller has posted at Many2Many offers important, and fuller, commentary. He says there:

It is disappointing to me that the major media has been mostly silent in their condemnation of CBS's response to this scandal. Even granting, against reason, that there remains a serious debate about the authenticity of the documents, and that CBS's "checks and balances" for vetting this story were sufficient, the response of CBS to its critics has been outrageous. Where are the outraged calls for more transparency on the part of CBS News from the editorial boards of the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune or Wall Street Journal? Why haven't anchors of the other networks called for CBS to establish an internal, or better yet, an external investigation into the issue? Any profession that won't police its own when members egregiously violate the fundamental tenets of that profession will very quickly lose all credibility. More importantly, the press plays a vital and critical role in forcing transparency on government. How effectively will the press be able to play that role if it adopts the stonewalling tactics of the government when it is subject to criticism? If our watchdogs cannot even watch themselves, the Fourth Estate will become ever more ineffective.

Jeff Jarvis subsequently asserted that this affair is 'bigger than Dan Rather. It's bigger than CBS. It's about journalism and Big Media and their relationship with the citizenry and democracy. It's about sharing authority with the people'. I'd like to believe this, but Steven Johnson has surely got it right:

I've been thrilled to see the team effort over the past ten days that toppled the CBS documents story. But could we have a brief reality check for just one split second? For all of you announcing that Rathergate is a watershed moment in the history of journalism, the moment when the swarm Davids finally outfoxed the big media Goliath -- remember that this was a story that was uniquely suited for the living-room journalism that flourishes in the blogging world. You didn't even need Google to crack this case: 95% of the relevant facts that proved the documents to be forged were available simply by switching applications. If there's a watershed here, it's this: from this day on, you can be sure that any time a national news story appears that revolves around Microsoft Word's auto-formatting features -- the blogosphere will OWN that story!

Think about the other major stories that broke in the last year or so involving misrepresentations or other abuses of power: the Plame Affair, Abu Ghraib, the whole missing-WMD madness. Did the bloggers contribute anything substantive to the reporting -- to the facts, not the opinions -- of those stories? No, because the central elements in those stories were not matters of typography; to advance them you couldn't just launch Microsoft Word or Google for "Niger documents." Until the blogosphere figures out a way to contribute to those kinds of stories -- and not just ones where a knowledge of font trivia makes you a genuine expert -- I think we'll still prove to be better at framing the news than making it ourselves.

Update, 5.10.2004: I've just seen this posting (14 September) by Matthew Yglesias —

I'm not quite sure I grasp all the blogosphere triumphalism surrounding the Killian memos. After CBS ran the story, the conservative side of the 'sphere came up with dozens of purported debunkings of their authenticity, almost all of which turned out to be more purported than debunking. Then after a few days of back-and-forth, traditional reporters at The Washington Post came out with a more careful, more accurate, more actually-debunking story. The folks at PowerLine and LGF are, at best, Gettier cases, they didn't do any of the actual debunking. Instead, it was done by reporters working for major papers. And good for them. And shame on CBS. But I don't really see what the blogs had to do with it.