Well said.

Two points, minor one first: "Wednesday".

More importantly, CBS claim they they did consult a document expert. Either they are lying, or their document expert has the brains of a cabbage - or they were told that the documents were obvious fakes but went ahead with the story anyway.

I'd like to find out which of these is the case.

Pixy,

From what I've gathered, that expert was a signature expert only.

...and he was asked only to verify the signature.

Although they keep trying to imply (without actually saying) that they consulted general document-authentication experts to vet the entire document.

The whole article is a hypertext lin right back to yourself.

Re: "shamelessly attention-seeking nobodies," I want to remind you I was the first to cry "Watergate" on this one.

Not that it'll actually pan out that CBS did get the docs from the Kerry campaign, but, you know, just in case.

Wow, that was fast.

How do you think the CBS mea culpa is going to be played? Who will take the hit, Rather? Some no name producer? Will they pin it on their "source" who they will then conveniently refuse to reveal because, you know, the first amendment and all that? I'd be interested to hear your take on the various options.

A few observations:

1. Sept 9, 2004 - surely a day that will live in journalistic infamy. Perhaps destined to become THE day that observers will reference as the "Day the MSM Died." I loved Lilek's explosion analogy. “Blogs haven’t toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: you’ve see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke – then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. We’ve been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies.” Sort of summed up the whole unraveling in one neat paragraph.

2. What about CBS News' most important constituency: it's advertisers? What's their reaction to Rather's missteps? What backlash might we realistically expect?

3. It's bears repeating that what this whole episode helps reveal is the persistent, rotten-to-the-core liberal bias that pervades MSM. ANY leak, rumor, hint, or allegation that might reflect unfavorably on the Republications is treated as if it were Holy Scripture; completely and wholly unassailable and believable. The opposite, however, is that damaging assertions about the Democrats is treated callously and with almost complete disdain. In the MSM worldview, it's much better to trust a few pages of questionable documents, than it is to support the sworn testimony of nearly 250 Swift Boat veterans.

I, for one, welcome our new media overlords. All hail The Blog.

Ace--

Perfectly said.

I too was skeptical yesterday morning, until LGF did their experiment. Would I have believed Chuck Johnson if he had said "Trust me, I spoke to an expert"? No, and I consider him trustworthy. But he *proved* it to me, and I finally had to believe my own lying eyes.

I posted this morning about "a hangover"-- too many posts too fast, and you get sloppy and sick. Barring new developments, I'm gonna back off this for a little while, especially since you and everybody else are doing such a great job covering this stuff.

I will, however, permit myself a bit of hyperbole, something I've been saying since last night. This is as important to the blogosphere as Monica, and perhaps even more important. There, it was one man doing the reporting, one man with the scoop. Yesterday, it was that vaunted "hive mind" working together-- and in competition-- to discover the truth for themselves. And that process exposed the intellectual ossification of Old Media, their willingness to accept whatever fits into their predetermined world view.

We question-- we question even the statements we agree with. THAT'S a good trait to have in this day in age.

Cheers,
Dave
Garfield Ridge

I, for one, welcome our new media overlords. All hail The Blog.

Okay, Kent.

{edited-- forgot Kent Brockman's name; called him "Brock"}

"Hive mind" sounds so...Borg. Where's Seven of Nine?

Excellent post. What more can I add? Nothing.

Another thing about the media that I haven't seen mentioned is that probably about 99.8% of them never served in the military. I took one look at "SUBJECT: CYA" and thought "bullshit, no one would ever write that in a military document".

The "Rove is behind this" guys are playing into our hands.

They are basically saying that CBS was so obviously in the tank for Kerry (or against Bush, if you will), that Rove could count on them to go big with their broadcast of easily debunkable forgeries.

Ace -

In any news cycle there are several things going on, and they are not necessarily discrete: 1. Collection of information; 2. Authentication of information; and 3. "Telling the Story." All three of these jobs can be divided into "work units" of various kinds. These work units lend themselves to distributed (or parallel) processing to various degrees.

CBS in fact did Step 1 in its entirety. It collected all of the information and presented it to the world in the form of the memos. CBS's downfall is that it only saw one facet of the information contained in the memos - the words themselves. The words are quire damning to President Bush. Unfortunately for Dan Rather & Co. the memos also contained information which was quickly apparent to people like Donald Sensing (the memo told him a non-military person wrote it), Charles Johnson (the memo told him it was written in MS Word 97 on a PC), and INDC Journal correspondent Phillip Boufard.

What Sensing, Johnson, Boufard, and others did was Step 2 (the step CBS apparently skipped), authentication.

INDC and Powerline (and many others) then proceeded to Step 3 and "Told the Story" as they saw it.

Step 1 work units cannot be disseminated. In the case of the Memos themselves, if they really had come from someone's personal files sending one person would collect all of them and sending a second person would not produce any more than "all". Most "stories" however have more than one work unit and so these units can be done in parallel - but this requires coordination. It takes someone with a "bird's eye view" to say "Bob, interview people on the scene; and Mike, hit the library."

Once information is collected anyone with access to it can evaluate and authenticate. Millions of people can do Step 2 simultaneously, as we saw yesterday. Of those millions 99% probably have no more expertise than Dan Rather, but the few that do (such as those mentioned above) will make the difference.

Step 3, telling the Story, can be done by anyone with a blog. Again, any one Story work-unit can probably be told by no more than 3-7 people; but many, many stories can be told at once and the internet’s distributed evaluation of the stories will ensure that the most compelling will get the attention they deserve.

What does this mean? It means the "Old" Media will continue to exist into the foreseeable future, but with a reduced role. The paid journalists are the ones with the time and the coordination to commit resources to the most resource-intensive step, Step 1.

This is the future. The next time someone collects damning-looking information (Fox or ABC, say) the smart thing to do will be to present them to the public without conclusions and then act as a clearing house for the Authentications and Stories. The news Collectors will then still be able to generate traffic and generate revenue by advertising, as always.

If this post is too long, just take away one thing: Collecting information (the Investigative part of Investigative Journalism) requires accumulated and focused capital (human and otherwise). Hobbyists gave way to professionals a long time ago in this department, and there is still a need for professional Investigators ... but the 21st Century's low, low cost of information sharing now ensures "Authentication" and "Telling the Story" belongs to the multitudes.

My favorite part of this whole situation is that, as I see it, it all can be traced back to Bill Clinton, Monica, and Newsweek. If Clinton hadn't gotten a BJ from Monica, then Newsweek would have never written a story about it, which got killed by the editors hours before press time, which then got picked up by Drudge, who spearheaded the independent internet journalism trend.

Also, is anyone really surprised about how this is all playing out in the mainstream media? If Fox had published fake memos about Kerry, the MSM would be in an uproar. Instead, they're in full CYA mode. In fact, maybe that's why one of the memos carries CYA as the subject.

Rocketeer--

I'll show you where Seven of Nine is: eating bon-bons after crushing the hopes and dreams of Illinois Republicans.

http://garfieldridge.blogspot.com/2004/09/alan-keyes-is-making-sense.html

Cheers,
Dave
Garfield Ridge

Will 9/9 go down in history as the Old Media's 9/11?

I, too, questioned the use of "CYA".

Still waiting for someone with more resources than me to provide the answers.

Brock,

This is an interesting set of ideas, but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion.

I'm currently working towards a PhD in neuroscience (OK, not CURRENTLY, but you know what I mean) so watching this story develop, and amazed by the speed at which the blogosphere eats lies and shits truth, I've been thinking:

1. Could we make science more like the blogoshpere?

2. Would we want to?

The answer to 1. is obviously, "Yes." I could easily post all the data I've ever collected to an FTP site. It would be gigs and gigs of crap, but I could do it.

Would I want to? The blogosphere's recent success demonstrates what every neuroscientist knows already: that distributed, massively parallel networks can be much more efficient than hierarchical, serial networks. The brain uses 100 million times less power than a comparable (hypothetical) computer would. Of course, there are far fewer people who are interested in what I'm doing than there are in the political blogosphere (so the "network" would be a lot smaller), but there's no doubt in my mind that we would work faster, and waste less time if we all shared everything (data, experimental protocols, analysis code, half-baked ideas) all the time, rather than just sharing a little bit of the "finished product" (the highly polished, sometimes heavily spun "story") via peer-reviewed publication.

Just like in journalism, though, the hard part of science, the time consuming, failure-ridden, make-you-want-to-cry part is collecting data (this is why most professors don't do experiments, they just write papers based on their grad students' data.) Given that I have bled (literally, I got four stitches due to a klutzoid malfunction with a scalpel earlier this year) for my data, how is it in my interest to share it with others before I've squeezed every last publishable drop of career advancement I can out of it?

I think a similar dynamic is likely to take hold in the political news and information market. Reporters are going to guard their sources more zealously, and news organizations are going to stop being so stupid as to make .pdfs of source documents available to everybody on the internet. Remember, these people are not trying to convince *US* to vote for Kerry. There are no atheists in foxholes, and there are no undecided voters in the blogosphere. The MSM are trying to trick what they would call the "sheeple" and what we would call people with "lives" or maybe even "dates" into voting for Kerry. Who among us even watches network news anymore, except for a chuckle? Only an "obsessive crank" is going to download a .pdf from CBS News' website, and given that there is now a demonstrated non-zero chance of said crank using information gleaned from that .pdf to make CBS News look like a ass, why take that chance, when the benefit to CBS news of making the .pdf available is essentially zero?

Of course, this is how the RIAA responded to a similar threat, and look how well THAT worked out for them. Still, the MSM has an arrogant, out-of-touch institutional culture, just like the RIAA, so they will probably make similar decisions.

PS 7 of 9 is having sex with her new BF in front of strangers in an underground Paris sex club and loving it, because a girl will always immediately do with her n+1th BF what she would slap her nth BF for asking her to do.

I think it's really the whole "summer of the blog." Think back to the Syrian Wayne Newton story, which arose online and then beat the NYT through the use of Google. Granted, that ran on Womens' Wall Street and NRO, not blogs (although blogs were important in keeping the story alive and fact checking), but I still consider them both electronic "new media" with a fast turnaround, even if they have editors.

Then of course there's the swiftvets story, with Captain's Quarters and Powerline and Patterico and Beldar especially doing great work keeping that alive and calling BS on the media's gullibility.

Both of these stories show that old media should have known we were watching.

Then the bloggers were turned loose at the conventions, and picked up a few nuggets there. Most interesting to me were the widely differing stories Terry McAuliffe told when Powerline and Hugh Hewitt interviewed him and asked about Kerry in Cambodia. (Lileks wrote a column about this a while back.)

The old media's not going to implode. But it's going to have to adapt to the fact that there are a million skeptical bloodthirsty amateur journalists out there ready to smack them down if they get out of line.

I think this is the point of Wikipedia, no?

Ace,
Congrats on a well earned Instalink!

thanks

I;m sure right now that Dan Rather is thinking ... "it's all Al Gore's fault for inventing the internet."

DLTV -

_Of course_ the MSM is going to react similarly to the RIAA. They're going to close ranks and stop providing source data. In fact, I hope they do. The more quickly they prove they're totally incapable of dealing with the 21st Century the more quickly the rest of America will abandon them and turn to the New Media.

In other words, I'm in favor of evolution, and if the Dinosaurs start jumping into the tar pits on their own, I ain't gonna shed a tear.

Brock,

Right. But that means that you're going to have to risk cutting your finger off with a scalpel to keep playing this game (within the context of my science metaphor.)

My advice to you is to start buying old typewriters at garage sales and selling them on Ebay. My gut says the market's goin up!

Guys

Thanks for the technical info. I've been showing all my relatives my faux US Army comendations, etc., which I'd forged down at Kinkos recently. Anyone know where I can find a manual typewriter from the '60s so I can do them over?

TomCom

Your piece dovetails nicely with something I wrote yesterday.

I was trying to get down to the root of why Democrats and Journalists seem to be such close cousins these days. It has something to do with journalism becoming an elite profession.

Your post hit the nail on the head, and I quoted the appropriate passages here.