Its Wednesday night about at 5:43 EST and I am eagerly awaiting the newest CBS statement regarding the Bush National Guard memos. At this time it would appear to be a foregone conclusion that Rather and company will finally come clean and admit that the documents are forgeries. At this point they would seem to have little choice since the wave of doubt and criticism seems to be growing by the hour. Despite digging in his heels and his protestations that people with agendas are promoting the forgery theory, Rather and CBS president Hayward can longer prolong the inevitable.
Virtually no one who has been involved with the authentication of the original documents for CBS has stood by them. Two of the original experts contacted, as late as last Wednesday night had urged CBS not to go forward with the story as they had serious doubts about their authenticity. The two alleged experts who had stood by CBS have also had problems as one has said that he was a handwiritng expert and could not vouch for the text of the documents. The other who was a former typewriter salesmen who was arguing the point that the New Times Roman script could have been produced on a vintage 1972 IBM Selectric has subsequently been completely discredited. The Texas National Guard officer who was quoted in the CBS 60 Minutes segment admitted that he thought the notes were hand written not typed and he only said the language sounded like something Lt. Colonel Killian might have written. He hadn't actually seen anything written. Add to this the cacophony of criticism in the blogosphere and now the Johnny come latelys of the main stream media and you have an overwhelming negative verdict on CBS's conduct in this affair. The result is that Rather and the network are backed into a very small corner and how they react may indeed result in their being relegated to the cheap seats of American media.
There are any number of questions which are brought to mind over this entire sordid affair. How could a national network the size of CBS with its enormous resources have been taken in so badly? Were they duped or was it a partisan effort by Rather and company to off set the damage done to Kerry? What concern should we have for our system in general if journalism is being replaced by rabid partisanship?
From my perspective the answers to those questions are relevant but in terms of the over all picture of the American election process it will not have significant impact. The reason for this can be stated in the simplest terms. The Web!
This might have been a watershed event in many areas of American political and journalistic life. The web to this point has revolutionized many areas of American life. Web games, EBay, Etrade, Email, homework, dating, training, chat rooms, Napster, we can go on and on using examples of how it has changed our life. Politics and its coverage by the media has now been impacted just as dramatically.
It began this season with the Swiftvets. A relatively small and underfunded 527 group was able to forcibly alter the debate, force attention from the mainstream media and negate tens of millions of dollars in traditional political advertising because it caught attention in the blogosphere. Now to demonstrate even more influence the blogosphere has taken a network and brought it to its knees and forced it to adhere to its own self proclaimed standards. All as the result of a huge network of people from all walks of life with all different view points simply trying to find out whats really going on. The American media will never be the same.
