MSM Aims at Bloggers; Hit Own Foot

This article from the Christian Science Monitor is not really a hit piece on bloggers, but the reporter certainly intended to take the blogosphere down a notch or three. In so doing, he illustrates why fisking is such a popular sport among the pajama-clad barbarians. He is oblivious to the fact that the very particulars he cites contradicts the thesis he presents.

Since the CBS furor, the blogging community has been showered with accolades in opinion pages and editorials. Still, it's premature to start awarding Pulitzer prizes to the laptop set. Professional journalists have been the ones consulting experts and following up promising leads.

Let's just note that it was also "professional journalists" who bit on the forgery in the first place. We have bigger fish to fry.

"I would argue that we were able to do a few things that blogs were not," avers Christopher Isham, chief of investigative projects at ABC News, one of the first news outlets to challenge CBS's documents.

That would be a good point if he told us what those things were. But he does not do that. Just a quote and an assertion.

Charles Johnson, a blogger in Los Angeles with an expertise in typography, suspected forgery: The documents looked too contemporary. He typed one of the memos into a Microsoft Word document - using the program's default settings - and found that the CBS documents were an exact match. He sent Power Line a link to his findings at LittleGreenFootballs.com.

Hey, an expert and an experiment. Unfortunately for Mr. Humphries, also a blogger linked by other bloggers.

By noon, Bill Ardolino of the INDC Journal blog had seen the Power Line stories and interviewed a typeface expert. The expert's doubts about the memos appeared that day on Mr. Ardolino's blog.

An expert, an interview. Alas, a blog. Strike two.

And, like a champion Bingo player, Power Line was also first to shout out that Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, the man who supposedly pressured Colonel Killian in a memo dated 1973, had retired a year and a half earlier.

Real research, a smart nose for a promising lead, confirmation of problems with the documents. All done by the uber-bloggers at Powerline. Swing and a miss. Strike three.

So what did ABC do that the bloggers did not?

The fallback position is that bloggers simply moved faster than the MSM, but the cavalry would still have arrived in time to shoot down the story.

Still, a perception exists among some bloggers - and among many news consumers - that without blogs the media wouldn't have picked up the story.

Not so, says Dan Gillmor, author of "We the Media" and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. "People upset about the documents and raising questions would have been on the phone to every reporter they could get on the phone to."

Color me unconvinced. Colonel Killian's son and wife expressed their doubts about the documents to the journalists at CBS to no avail. Does anyone really believe that the New York Times or NBC would have started an investigation on their own if PowerLine, LGF, and INDC Journal had not built up an overwhelming case by the time Mr. Isham sat down to lunch the day after the story aired?

But a follow-up question to Humphries, Isham, and Gilmor: Where is the MSM coverage of the AP scandal?

In a smaller but more recent example, bloggers attending a Sept. 3 Bush campaign stop challenged Associated Press claims that a Wisconsin crowd booed when the president announced that Bill Clinton was to undergo heart surgery. Several blogs posted audio and video of the rally on their sites, and the AP later retracted its story.

PowerLine did yeoman work on this one as well. And the offense was even more egregious. For an AP reporter to make stuff up in order to smear Republican voters is much different than trying to score a scoop and being conned in the process. Moreover, the AP has continued to stonewall the question. Let's count the days until Mr. Isham and ABC "break" the story.

How about we knock down some straw men?

Other critics have complained that blogs can traffic in rumor, such as a claim in February that Sen. John Kerry had had an affair with a former intern.

As I recall, one of the sites that flogged this story the hardest was Wonkette who is hardly a typical blogger. She is, after all, a professional journalist with all the right credentials to "deserve" our trust. Not at all like those non-journalists in Minnesota who went after Dan Rather and the AP.

Another thing. Reporters gossip and spread rumors among themselves. These provide the subtext to a lot of the newsgathering and editorial decision-making. Readers and viewer, however, never see or hear of it. At least with blogs it is all out in the open, which lets the reader in on the back-story.

"We can't be too quick to equate the bona fides and journalistic chops of a blogger with that of any mainstream media organization," says Christopher Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News. "The bloggers do not have any system of checks and balances. My issue is simply when we start elevating these journals of opinion to the level of newspapers of record, so to speak."

This is a two-fer. First, no one is talking about turning a blog into a "paper of record." Instead, we are replacing the very idea of a paper of record with a customized morning paper with built-in checks and balances. Bad news for Bill Keller; good news for the curious, intelligent reader.

Second, Klein keeps bringing up "checks and balances" but does not acknowledge that these keep failing. Rathergate is just the most recent example. The corruption at "60 Minutes" goes back decades. The Audi 5000 story was laughable on its face and was demolished by exhaustive tests run by "Car and Driver". The hit piece of General Westmoreland was bad then and gets worse as we learn more from the archives. Has anyone at CBS ever uttered one word on the record about their mistakes or corrected their conclusions in light of additional evidence?

UPDATE: Wizbang has more examples here.