Media dinosaurs, your game is up
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee, publishes the InstaPundit.com weblog.
DAN Rather - the biggest of big-foot news anchors at CBS, a television network regarded by many, until recently, as the premier TV news operation in the US - has had a rough couple of weeks. But they're just a harbinger of things to come, not just for Rather and CBS but for traditional left-leaning news operations across the world.
The immediate cause of Rather's travails is the almost laughably inept journalism that led to the broadcast of a story based on fraudulent documents regarding President George W. Bush's National Guard service.
Nor was the fraud hard to spot: the documents look exactly as if they were produced using a laser printer and Microsoft Word in 2004, rather than a typewriter and Liquid Paper in 1972 and 1973. CBS can't quite say where the documents came from, it failed to interview the wife and son of the (conveniently deceased) purported author, who say that the documents are forgeries, and it ignored the evidence of document experts who told them the papers were almost certainly fraudulent.
Not surprisingly, within hours of the documents being placed on the internet, people were raising questions. And it's a testament to the cluelessness of the old journalists -- members of what people on the internet like to call "legacy media" -- that they were more suspicious of the rapidity with which these questions appeared than of the documents. Post obviously bogus documents on the internet and find people asking questions about them within hours -- it must be a conspiracy!
In fact, it was the power of open-source journalism. CBS, like most broadcast networks in the US -- and, for some reason, just about everywhere else -- is staffed by people who lean Left and who don't like Bush. That makes them disposed to find even obviously bogus claims about Bush (such as the oft-repeated story that he served US troops in Iraq a plastic turkey on his visit last year, an exploded claim that Australian journalist-blogger Tim Blair gleefully points out whenever it resurfaces) credible, despite the evidence.
Worse yet, they tend to talk mostly with people who share their beliefs. The result is an insular culture, rife with the prejudices of the New Class, which believes all sorts of absurdities and peddles them to the public in the sometimes honest, if often unfounded, belief that they are true. Even when they are exposed as false, the response is often to assert, as Rather did for a while, that the story may have been false, but that it was justified because the underlying point (people who agree with us are good, while people who don't are bad) is nonetheless true. After all, everyone they talk to thinks so.
Not long ago, CBS probably would have got away with it. The documents would have flashed on the screen for two or three seconds, a few readers might have scratched their heads and remarked, "those sure look like they were done on Microsoft Word", and perhaps a few comments would have been exchanged around water coolers, to no effect. Most people would have assumed that CBS had done a thorough investigation and that their idle suspicions were just that.
But not any more. Now the cocoon has broken. With the documents on the internet, tens of thousands of people, with expertise in everything from computer typesetting to early 1970s military jargon were able to look at the memos, form their own opinions and communicate them widely. CBS had a staff of (perhaps) dozens working on these documents -- not very hard, obviously -- for a few weeks. After the broadcast, however, tens of thousands of people were looking at the documents, bringing far more man-hours, and apparently far more scepticism and expertise, to bear. As Bryan Curtis wrote in Slate: "CBS spent less time verifying the Guard documents than most bloggers."
If there's an analogy to this phenomenon, it's probably the open-source software movement, which tends to produce far more reliable products via the same process of distributed criticism and relative freedom from groupthink. But I'm afraid that the internet's threat to cocooned old-media organisations is far greater than the threat that Microsoft poses to Linux.
That's because writing software is hard. Journalism -- particularly journalism practised as it's practised at CBS (or as the similarly humiliating Andrew Gilligan affair demonstrates, at the BBC) is easy. Those who have lived within the comfortable big-media cocoon have done so not because they possess unusual talents, but because they have had access to the tools for disseminating news and opinion, tools that were until recently so expensive that only a favoured few could use them. They had the megaphone; the rest of us did not.
Those days are over. Nowadays everyone has a megaphone and those with something interesting to say often discover that their megaphone can become very large, very fast. Meanwhile, those in the legacy media are discovering that their megaphones are shrinking as the result of journalistic self-abuse. With the tools now available to everyone, the biggest asset is credibility, something they have already squandered in the belief that no one would know the difference.
Nor is this phenomenon likely to be limited to the US. The Gilligan affair, and the attitudes and behaviours it exposed, has seriously wounded the credibility of the BBC, and there seems no reason to think that other broadcasters across the world, whether state-affiliated or merely oligopolistic, are likely to do any better. As always happens when the comfortable are afflicted by competition, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth at this phenomenon. But given the performance of these dinosaurs over recent decades, there seems little reason to mourn the change.
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