I was clicking through cable TV channels the other night looking for something (anything) to watch when I came across two guys sparring over "Memogate." Had CBS News' twangy elder, Dan Rather, fallen for phony memos that purported to show that President George W. Bush received preferential treatment and failed to fulfill his National Guard duty some 30 years ago?
Keeping with cable news custom, one guest was there to attack CBS, the other to defend Rather. Unfortunately, I only caught the tail end of their prickly exchange. But when the CBS apologist was asked about the role bloggers played in propelling the story to national scandal, he dismissed them as little more than journalist-wannabes, sitting in their underwear in front of their PCs, typing whatever thoughts/opinions/rants they had between trips to the refrigerator.
My first thought was if bloggers had no credibility then why was this guy on my television, defending CBS?
Unless you've been in seclusion without a TV, radio, internet connection or access to newspapers, you know what I'm talking about. On Sept. 9, Dan Rather, moonlighting on 60 Minutes II, claimed that then-Lt. Bush grabbed a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard by leaping past hundreds of applicants on a waiting list, and, once there, failed to meet minimum performance standards.
Rather relied heavily on copies of documents signed by Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush's National Guard commander. Of particular note was an Aug. 19, 1973, memo in which Killian complained of pressure to "sugarcoat" a Bush performance review after the future president skipped a required flight physical.
Almost immediately, right-wing blogs like Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Power Line raised questions about the documents' authenticity. They pointed out that the copies of the copies supposedly typed by Killian were actually in Times New Roman, the default typeface of Microsoft Word (first released in 1989, five years after the Texas National Guardsman's death).
There were other incongruities: a superscripted "th" character after numbers like 19; the fact that memos listed a post office box and not a valid street address; the use of certain nonstandard National Guard abbreviations.
At first, Rather refused to consider the possibility that CBS had been duped, brushing off both journalists, who he called "the professional rumor mill," and bloggers, whose "motivations" he questioned.
Feeling the heat, CBS produced experts to buttress its story, only to have them recant. Some claimed they had warned CBS about the documents. Others believed they had been misled or their findings misinterpreted. Meanwhile, the Associated Press retained its own expert who concluded the memos had most likely been word-processed. ABC, CNN, NBC, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and USA Today weighed in on the growing media scandal – all of which prompted CBS to announce its own investigation. When the network couldn't authenticate the four documents it used in the piece, and its source for the memos changed his story as to how he ended up with them, CBS News admitted to a "mistake in judgment."
But if it weren't for wild and wooly blogs – in this case, conservative ones – the story might have withered on the vine. They function as a vast, ad-hoc quality-control department, reflecting the entire political spectrum. Suddenly readers can (and do) subject reporters to unprecedented levels of scrutiny. Facts are analyzed and checked against their sources, quotes deconstructed, grammar parsed – all of this done in public view.
This isn't the first time that blogs have kept an issue alive. The first blog-driven controversy caused the fall of Trent Lott when bloggers located quotes from previous speeches that many believed were racist. Another led to The New York Times op-ed page instituting a policy on corrections for its columnists.
Whether a blog leans left, right or sideways, as a collective force they are working to keep reporters honest. Journalists may not like their methods – having your work sliced and diced in public is no fun – but the end result may be better-quality news.
Just ask Mr. Rather what happens if the facts in a story don't hold up to scrutiny.
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Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and the assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the department of journalism.
