September 12, 2004

No Disputing It: Blogs Are Major Players From the LA Times, registration required.

These days, CBS News anchor Dan Rather and his colleagues at the network's magazine program "60 Minutes II" are enduring an unusual wave of second-guessing by some of the public and fellow journalists. For that, they can thank "Buckhead." It was a late-night blog posting by this mystery Netizen that first questioned the validity of documents Rather cited Wednesday as proof that George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard duty more than 30 years ago. Buckhead refuses to further identify himself, other than dropping hints that he is a male who lives on the East Coast — preferring to proclaim that the scramble to verify the contentions in his posting marks an extraordinary achievement for a medium that has operated more as an underground world of ideological venting than a source of legitimate news. But Buckhead is vehement about one thing: He acted alone when he posted, to the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, what was widely believed to be the first allegation that the CBS report relied on documents that could have been forged.

posted by squidranch 20 years ago
  • pigheaded porkpie
  • "It was wildly circulating in the blogosphere until Drudge linked us. Then it was instantly known to a million people, and it was all of a sudden a legitimate story." Legitimate? Are we talking about the same Drudge? While "pigheaded porkpie" is an appropriate descriptor, it is also a user/login for the LATimes.
  • New York Daily News
    Enough already, fumed New Yorkers yesterday, as the Bush and Kerry campaigns resumed their brawl over the presidential candidates' Vietnam War-era military service. "Bush and Kerry seem to spend all their time arguing about what they did 40 years ago, and not telling us what they'll do after November," complained Rosa Munoz, 46, of the Bronx. "I don't care what you did years ago, I care about what you are doing now." "They're blowing the whole war record situation out of proportion," said Howard Thompson, 57, a Vietnam vet and Brooklyn transit worker. "We have to deal with the things that affect us today."
    Remember when Bill Clinton said that he could have went to Vietnam, but he didn't because he didn't support the war and the story died in 1991? He even said so again on The Daily Show (real player video). He lays out why the Bush administration attacked Kerry and McCain's military records. For the record I think the Killian memo is likely bogus. Remember, the Bush administration is saying it's real. The only reason I can figure is to get ahead of the story.
  • FreeRepublic is a discussion forum, not a blog. they even say it on their home page. (It's not even a good discussion forum, and has been way too heavily moderated over the years.) Blogs should not get any credit for this.
  • Maybe they should get credit for carrying the story. Otherwise it might have become a non-story very quickly. Then again, I'm cynical of Big Media to begin with...
  • freep! freep! freep! freep!
  • If you were going to fake documents, wouldn't you find out what technology was used at the time? I would. No medieval manuscripts on woodpulp paper for me. (Unless they had that, of course).
  • Now what needs to happen is for one of these big media types to take another look at little green whatever and do a story on what a simmering hive of racists it is.
  • One of the things that annoys me about old-media stories about blogs as the fresh new hotness is that so many of the name political bloggers are the sort of guys who would get op-ed space anyway (or are op-ed writers/journalists/authors anyway). Political bloggers have stopped being the revolution, if they ever were the revolution. Now they're a farm team for punditry and think tanks, or stringers for guys who are. I'm cynical about big media, but I'm also cynical about blogs. Bloggers who picked up the freeper post may have been the channel for this particular story, but I'm not convinced that someone wouldn't have picked it up anyway. What sells news is conflict, and the memo story has it in spades. On top of the political implications, there are a lot of people who would love to take Dan Rather's scalp for being a chump about document authenticity. I guess I don't see how journalists who also happen to blog picking up an otherwise interesting story on their personal sites and pushing it into the mainstream media is a surprise.
  • I think Jeff Harrell's restraint in this thread has been admirable. Yes, I'm serious.