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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Palau who wrote (632890)	9/26/2004 11:44:32 AM
From: jim-thompson	Respond to of 769670

this is good. gnaw on it for awhile. can you imagine the democrap's sorrow that dan lather finally acknowledged the documents could not be authenticated? i don't know if dan lather ever admitted they were fraudulent and forged. JAY AMBROSE: Blogging heard 'round the world Copyright © 2004 Nando Media Copyright © 2004 Scripps Howard News Service Scripps Howard News Service (September 14, 2:14 pm ADT) - When recently confronted with evidence of phony-baloney documentation of a scandalous accusation against President Bush, Dan Rather said, "I think the public is smart enough to see from whom some of this criticism is coming and draw judgments about what they are." The implication of the CBS anchor - seeming to confirm a bias uninstructed by scrutiny - is that White House hatchet men were those chopping away at the authenticity of documents supposedly showing Bush disobeying National Guard orders. Nope. As Rather could have learned by scanning newspapers, the criticism of the documents trotted out on a "60 Minutes" program came initially from a great, relatively new democratic force: Internet bloggers, themselves part of the public. What are they? A great many things, including analytically able citizens alert to discrepancy and fraud and with an instrument at hand - the Web - that enables them to reach thousands of fellow citizens in a matter of seconds. They also happen to be the worst nightmare of big media, or of any institution large or small, public or private, that would just as soon escape having its flaws and failures detected and publicized. According to the Los Angeles Times, a blogger calling himself "TankerKC" got things rolling with a message to FreeRepublic.com the same night as the "60 Minutes" show. He thought there was something fishy about the documents, and a few hours later, another blogger called "Buckhead" said it looked to him like they were typed with a word processor instead of the sort of typewriter that would have been available in the 1970s when Bush's now-deceased commander was supposed to have done the writing. Before the evening was done, others had joined in the exploration on still more Web sites, and over the next couple of days, several mainstream newspapers and magazines had helped to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the documents were guilty as charged. With Microsoft Word, which did not exist three decades ago, you can get the typeface, spacing and various other features of the documents in question down to a T, it is reported. With one highly expensive typewriter that the commander almost certainly would not have had in his office, but that was around in the 70s, you apparently can come close, but no cigar. It turns out that there are other problems with the memos, such as a reference to pressure being applied on behalf of Bush by an officer who was retired at the time the memo was supposedly written. Two of CBS's consultants about the documents' authenticity refuse to go so far out on a limb as CBS said they already had. One of them had reportedly been told not to talk to the press, a position contrary to the usual values of a news organization, as others have noted. The Washington Post not only quotes Rather as speaking the words in this column's first paragraph, but also as saying that he is sticking to his guns until proven wrong. Hmm. Perhaps even without the bloggers, we would have known how CBS went so wrong, but quite possibly not. I am grateful for them, even though bloggers can obviously be wrong, too. The blogging movement seems to me the stuff of democracy, and, if we keep our definition loose, comes in forms other than factual inquiry. There is also ideological argument and humor sent via e-mail. In this latter category, one of my favorite purveyors is Dick Jacobs of Tucson, Ariz. I have learned from his e-mails and a phone conversation that he is now retired but was a newsman, a speechwriter for corporate executives and a press secretary for the late Sen. William Roth of Delaware. He sends his political humor column out for free (you can subscribe by e-mailing Dickjacobs825@msn.com or maximinpress@webtv.net) because he feels there are "conservatives out there who feel they are not being well-served by the liberal media." I share the first two paragraphs of a recent made-up story by Jacobs. It illustrates his style, and does something else: It helps explain the bumbling of late at CBS. PRINCETON, N.J. - Network TV executives are convinced their evening news shows are losing millions of viewers because the average American is hopelessly biased, a survey of the Phew Research Center indicates. "It's very dismaying," one network news executive said. "Millions of Americans are racist, homophobic right-wingers who have every intention of voting for Bush, even though sophisticated news anchors like Peter Jennings and Dan Rather keep trying to show them how unbelievably asinine that would be." Contact Jay Ambrose, director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers, at AmbroseJ@shns.com. adn.com