QandO: Citizen Journalists

September 10, 2004

Citizen Journalists
Posted by McQ

Well why not, we have citizen soldiers?

That's the name John Podhoretz gives bloggers and their readers in the 60 minutes/CBS News "Memogate" flap:

The populist revolution against the so-called mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush.
What the bloggers and their audiences did was call into profound question the authenticity of four documents proudly trumpeted by CBS News in a much-heralded investigative report on Wednesday night's edition of "60 Minutes" about the president's National Guard service in the early 1970s.

I'm sure well now be treated to some professor of journalism's lament about these unprecidented attacks on an institution he or she reveres. However, these 'corrections" by bloggers seem to be getting more frequent, not less.

Of course, as Podhoretz explains, the left was giddy with the find and just didn't look that closely at the evidence. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. It was exactly what they'd been looking for. It was perfect. Perhaps too perfect:

Liberals went wild with glee about the story, especially after the onslaught on John Kerry's Vietnam record by his fellow Swift-boat veterans.
Kevin Drum, the most talented of the left-wing bloggers, wrote: "This story is a perfect demonstration of the difference between the Swift-boat controversy and the National Guard controversy. Both are tales from long ago and both are related to Vietnam, but . . . in the National Guard case, practically every new piece of documentary evidence provides additional confirmation that the charges against Bush are true."

Drum simply assumed that the documents were above-board. So did The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which put the story on its front page on Thursday.

But we all know about "assumptions" don't we? Once the documents were released the scrutiny was on. First FreeRepublic and then Powerline were all over the authenticity of the memos. It spread like wildfire among blogs where readers offered comments and ideas, and in some cases expert testimony:

The Minneapolis lawyers who run powerlineblog.com were on the case early. Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to a note left on an Internet bulletin board on the freerepublic.com Web site — the 47th posting on the topic there.
Post No. 47 pointed out that there was something off about these documents from the 1970s: The spacing between the letters and the words was proportional, and only a few IBM electric typewriters could achieve that effect back then.

From there it was off to the races. Once anyone who had had experience writing and typing in the 1970s began examining the documents, it was impossible not to see some weird anachronisms that suggested they had been crafted not on a 1970s typewriter, but using Microsoft Word.

Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderful littlegreenfootballs.com, simply typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word's New Times Roman font and, lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS site, down to the letter spacing.

The documents contain such features as superscript lettering, which is done automatically by Microsoft Word, and curly quotation marks. A brief glance at a Web site called selectric.org, run by an amateur typewriter fanatic, reveals dozens of IBM electric typefaces — and none of them has curly quotation marks.

By 3 o'clock, the very careful and honest Jim Geraghty, who produces invaluable material every day on nationalreview.com's Kerry Spot, was saying flatly, "CBS had better have one heck of a defense for this."

The flap was highlited on Brit Hume's Special Report and Nightline had a special segment on it as well.

From the lies of Ben Barnes to the apparent forgeries of who-knows-who-did-it — why has "60 Minutes" exposed itself in this way?
We all know why. Its producers and others in the media think George Bush deserves to be beaten up now because of the beating administered to John Kerry in August. In some weird way, the editors and producers believe this is fairness at work.

Instead, they have unmasked themselves. Or rather, they have been unmasked by ordinary people who can see what they and their hired experts evidently could not.

It appears that 60 Minutes/CBS had produced a hit piece in which the examination of the authenticity of the evidence at hand was less important than the damage it would do to the Bush campaign. 5 years ago, they may have gotten away with it.

Not anymore.

More from Q and O on this here and here.

UPDATE:

Maybe we should go with a new name for this. Instead of "Memogate" we should call it:

RA^thERGATE

(Hat tip to my bro for that one)

UPDATE II: Wretchard at The Belmont Club describes what happened yesterday with the memo story being shredded by bloggers as a result of "the distributed intelligence of the Internet". Precisely ... a world body of available investigators and experts converged to cry "fake" to the memos. It is still reverberating in the old media and will for some time.

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Comments

The first i heard of this was yesterday on the Swifties website. A few guys were noting the discrepancies of what the document looked like and the ones they typed up in the service. I thought it was wishful thinking on their part...doesn't look like it.
Bloggers are deffinatly a torpedo in the hull of the big media's hull.

Posted by: mark m at September 10, 2004 08:15 AM

I'm coining the phrase "Citizen's Band Media".

Whaddaya think?

Posted by: Sharp as a Marble at September 10, 2004 08:21 AM

I'm sure well now be treated to some professor of journalism's lament about these unprecidented attacks on an institution he or she reveres.

Oh no. I'm sure that "citizen media" will become de rigeur in journalism curricula.

And they will focus on Indymedia.

Posted by: pdq332 at September 10, 2004 08:41 AM

yep, that's pretty good. You can use "Convoy" as the marching song for the new revolution.

Posted by: capt joe at September 10, 2004 08:43 AM

It's only been what, two weeks since CBS broke the non-story about alledged Israeli spies in the Pentagon? CBS' news credibility is approaching Weekly World News levels and is closing in fast. Next week, Dan Rather will be reporting on Bat Boy--and blaming Bush.

Posted by: Joe Maller at September 10, 2004 08:45 AM

It was exactly what they'd been looking for. It was perfect.

Soooo..... anybody heard from mkultra recently?

Is he still quoting Rick James?

Posted by: Walt at September 10, 2004 08:47 AM

Best comment on Kevin Drum's washingtonmonthly.com website, discussing the formatting, typefaces, etc. from 1960's and 1970's IBM typewriters: "Grrr. Why didn't they hire Zapf instead?" Gotta love it.

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