perfidy

Allah has a roundup of links to various speculations that recent documents regarding Bush's Guard service might have been, well, not exactly authentic.

[wik] The Weekly Standard talked to a few of its own document specialists, and reached a similar conclusion. If this all proves out, CBS and 60 Minutes are going to have some serious egg on the face. It seems that a desire to make the president look bad might have overcome any lingering sense of journalistic integrity at CBS.

[alsø wik] In a space of hours, several blogs (Powerline, Allahpundit, LGF, Command Post and others) have taken a suspicion, tracked it down, analysed it, and have begun to reach conclusions.

We hear a lot about new media lately, and naturally, within the blog world many are quick to dislocate a shoulder patting themselves on the collective back for the growing influence of the blogosphere. But occasional egomania should not distract us from the very real, and fast growing power of blogging on the media. This story is a perfect example. In a space of literally hours, bloggers have pushed a suspicion into informed speculation, and driven the story into the traditional media outlets. Fox news has mentioned it, and several papers are likely to put it on the front page tomorrow. UPI has picked up the story as well.

The beauty of all this is not so much that CBS and Dan Rather will be deeply embarrassed, or that lame attempts to make Bush look bad are exposed. (Though these are good things in their own right.) The beauty lies in the way that this happened. Private citizens, in their spare time, have cracked a story that the entire news department at a major broadcast network completely missed. Information bouncing back and forth between Powerline blog, Allahpundit, Command Post, LGF and all their commenters and email correspondants was sifted, processed and error checked almost instantaneously. Savvy professional newscritters picked up the thread, and used their own resources to further develop the consensus.

We are seeing an open source news media in action. This is not a new idea, to be sure, but one of the most powerful instances of the idea since the fall of Trent Lott. As this phenomenon grows, the major media will be ever more unable to ignore the findings of the blog consensus. And the benefit to the media consumer will be immense, when legions of the obsessed are fact checking everything the media produces.

[alsø alsø wik] CBS is launching an internal investigation, anf the Washington Post is covering it as well. One day turn around. Let's see what we can do about Kerry's trips to Paris.