September 9, 2004

Poll: Bush Leads Big

The latest WaPo/ABC News poll has President Bush up 52-43 over John Kerry among likely voters. No wonder the Kerry campaign and its allied 527s and the pro-Kerry media rushed to attack Bush with allegations based on what now look to possibly be forged documents.

If the documents are proven to be forgeries - and it is looking like that may well be the case - there will be major damage to the reputation of CBS and the Boston Globe - and the Kerry campaign would suffer collateral damage. It might even cause the pro-Kerry press to pull back a bit from carrying the water for the Kerry campaign and its allied 527s on future smear-attacks on Bush.

And as it is the blogosphere that first investigated and developed the forgery story, it may finally put an end to the notion that bloggers are inferior to the professional journalism elites.

Blogger Chuck Simmins says he's "never been prouder to be a blogger" than he is today.

Today we are seeing how blogging, and the freedom of information that the Internet brings, really works.

CBS, in its news show 60 Minutes, last night, proffered a number of documents that it says prove some things about President Bush's service in the National Guard. The Internet, bloggers, kicked in to gear and did what they always do. Thousands of people looked at the information that CBS made available. Hundreds of people used the Internet to research the facts further. Dozens of people turned to experts that they knew. And, voila!

Major media has been fact checked. The three or four researchers that CBS had on the job have been trumped by dozens and dozens of Net users and bloggers.

The lads at Powerline lead the pack right now. Many, if not all, of the documents that CBS used in its news story last night were phony, fake, forged. Powerline lays it all out in far greater detail.

My point is: this is how blogging works. Fact checking, research and reporting. All at the speed of light. A story that it took CBS weeks to prepare was obliterated in a matter of hours.

This is the future of news. Old media will be held to the same standard that bloggers are. News has to be well researched, sources cited, corrections noted, and contributors linked. And it all has to be done quickly. The public's right to know is turning in to "the public knows". You don't need to graduate from j-school to write the news in the Internet age.