Weekend Notes With "Forgery" Swirling in the Air
Pressthink
<font size=4>By Monday morning, we should know a great deal more about whether CBS News peddled forged documents as the real thing in its recent investigation of President Bush's National Guard Service. Here are some quick thoughts-- not about the charges, which seem serious to me, but about the general atmosphere and what's at stake if this turns into a political scandal.
Three things to stick in the front of your mind:
It completely elevates the episode and charges it with political and cultural tension that the anchorman, Dan Rather, presented the CBS report Wednesday Night accusing Bush of disappearing from Guard duty. If Sixty Minutes had presented a damaging story of that kind at the height of an election campaign and it turned out to be based on forged documents, that would itself be a crisis. But it was Dan Rather on Sixty Minutes, and it is now Rather on the hook if the documents are fake. That brings in Rather's celebrity, the corporate iconography in which an anchorman is always involved, the succession drama at CBS News now that Rather is 72 years old, and the enormous venom out there for Rather, who is seen on the Right as a man of many political sins.
Thus, PowerLine wrote: <font color=green>"This would appear to signal the end of Rather's career. If the documents are ultimately accepted as forgeries, which seems inevitable to us, he can't survive."<font color=black> All of which means this is not just a scandal, but a cultural theatre for it, and that's different.
Very quickly attention will shift to the confluence of events in the news media, in publishing, and in politics that made for "Guard week" this week-- to all the things that appeared within days of each other. Forces behind that confluence will be brought to light. Right inside the door of the CBS scandal there is a Dirty Tricks scandal waiting to come to light, if the documents turn out to be fakes.
Perhaps that explains this: <font color=blue>"Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell said Friday that if documents aired by CBS newsman Dan Rather Wednesday night turn out to be forged, as alleged by experts, the presidential race 'is over. It would be the end of the race,' Caddell told Fox News Live. 'It would be the end of the race,' he repeated."<font color=black>
This story is a bursting into open of what was called the <font color=blue>"undercard"<font color=black> in the earlier scandal story to which <font color=blue>"Guard week"<font color=black> is a reply of sorts-- the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their charges about John Kerry's military service. There, according to blogger Belmont Club, the big beef was between Kerry and the Swift Vets. But an undercard, fascinating in its own right, featured Mainstream Media vs Kid Internet. <font color=green>"The reigning champion, the Mainstream Media, has been forced against all odds to accept the challenge of an upstart over the coverage of the Swiftvets controversy."<font color=black> (See the original post by Wretchard at Belmont Club, and my take here.) Now that undercard has become the main event.
Other voices:
John Podhoretz of the New York Post sees a <font color=purple>"populist revolution against the so- called mainstream media"<font color=black> in the events of the last few days. <font color=purple>"Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush."<font color=black> Or against CBS.
Roger L. Simon apparently feels that Rather (or someone working for him) almost got away with the equivalent of electoral fraud. But the bloggers stopped it. Thus: <font color=purple>"when you think of what Rather could have done, uncriticized by bloggers (working, unlike him, virtually for nothing), it's blood curdling."<font color=black>
I found it interesting that Stirling Newberry of BOP News, who identifies Left, is not only convinced there's a credibility crisis for CBS (<font color=blue>"the simple truth is that the equipment that existed in 1972 would not have produced this output..."<font color=black>) but also for the <font color=blue>"left blogsphere," which "should be ashamed of itself for backing off of demanding what we will need to demand the next time Bush pulls a secret plan to save social security out of his nether regions."<font color=black>
Newberry's point is: a principled Left would not leap to defend Dan Rather and CBS because it likes the consequences of their reporting on Bush's National Guard years. Instead, demand what we need to see before the public can again have confidence in the report Rather aired Wednesday night.
Finally, the smartest thing I have seen written so far on the events in question is again by Belmont Club:
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The traditional news model is collapsing. It suffers from two defects. The <font color=blue>"news object"<font color=green> can no longer be given sealed attributes in newspaper backrooms. The days when the press was the news object foundry are dying. Second, the news industry is suffering from its lack of analytic cells, which are standard equipment in intellgence shops. Editors do some analysis but their focus is diluted by their attention to style and the craft of writing. The blogosphere and other actors, now connected over the Internet, are filling in for the missing analytic function. And although the news networks still generate, via their reporters, the bulk of primary news, they generate a pitiful amount of competent analysis.
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More later if the weekend weather is bad and I have a chance to absorb and write. <font size=3>
Posted by Jay Rosen at September 11, 2004 02:17 AM
journalism.nyu.edu. |
