September 10, 2004

Forgery Update 3

Jay Currie looks at how a "rabble" of bloggers exposed the forgeries that CBS, the Boston Globe and 60 Minutes used to smear the president.

One day. That was all it took for the ranks of citizen journalists to swarm and then thoroughly discredit a story which ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and on a network news magazine.

From the Kerry perspective a scandal involving forged documents is a disaster. Kerry had yesterday to get in front of the story and he missed that boat. Instead of being able to stay on message and trying to beat down the post convention pulse which has sent Bush several points ahead in various opinion polls, Kerry is likely to face questions about who was responsible for the forgeries. While it would be astonishing if anyone inside the Kerry organization had a hand in them, it is a question that will be asked. Moreover, the spectacle of Kerry announcing that his campaign organization and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with issuing those documents will occupy several critical news cycles and focus attention on character - exactly where Kerry does not want to be.

From the perspective of the establishment media, this, too, is a disaster. CBS will have to explain: where did the documents come from? What were the bona fides of the source? Who was the source? Which expert looked at the documents? How closely?

Those are the starter questions. The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value? Most fundamental of all, why did the New York Times, the Boston Globe and CBS allow themselves to be used for such a transparent attempt to slander President Bush?

And the next time some mainstream journalist tells me that blogs aren't reliable because bloggers don't have editors and fact-checkers, I'm going to remind him that bloggers fact-checked CBS, the Boston Globe and 60 Minutes on this story and found them to be spreading a smear based on forgeries.

This episode is proving that the traditional news media is, increasingly, inferior to blogs and blog-journalism.