Watch Those Heels

An acquaintance - one who is curiously antipathic toward bloggers - posted a message to an email forum this morning, titled "Bloggergate!", and gleefully linking to this Corey Pein piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, purporting to debunk the role of bloggers in contributing to the fall of Dan Rather and the shredding of the TANG Documents story.

I said I'd take some time to shred the Pein piece myself; predictably, Powerline beat me to it; their piece beats the Pein article like a bongo drum. Read both.

What do I have to add?

Where to start?

The CJR piece, in trying to impugn the alternative media's conclusions about Bill Burkett (the former Texas Army Guardsman and Democrat activist with a grudge against Bush and the Guard), notes:

many suppositions about Burkett are based on standards that were not applied evenly across the board. In November and December the first entry for “Bill Burkett” in Google, the most popular reference tool of the twenty-first century, was on a blog called Fried Man. It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign. While Burkett doesn’t like the president, many people in America share that opinion, and the sentiment doesn’t make him a forger.

Huh?

I'm trying to remember - what's the Latin term for Non-Sequitur again?

Sentiment doesn't make you a forger, indeed; if it did, I'd have an All Access pass to every Donnas concert in the Twin Cities.

But the little matter of the documents not even remotely plausibly being authentic? Quite another matter.

And the plausibility of the documents themselves? Pein sounds off:

Many of the typographic critiques were similarly flawed. Would-be gumshoes typed up documents on their computers and fooled around with the images in Photoshop until their creation matched the originals. Someone remembered something his ex-military uncle told him, others recalled the quirks of an IBM typewriter not seen for twenty years. There was little new evidence and lots of pure speculation. But the speculation framed the story for the working press.

There was, indeed, speculation. And hyperbole. And wrong guesses, and some just-plain BS in the storm of blogger commentary.

And in and among all of that, a couple of rock-solid threads:

• It was possible, via a series of events about as likely as Katie Couric getting a called third strike against Alejandro Rodriguez, for the documents to have been produced by a typewriter - as in a typewriter, a model that was highly unlikely to be found in a TANG orderly room in the seventies.
• The content of the documents themselves - especially the references to the then-retired General Buck Staut - made even that possibility seem remote

Pein doesn't deign to address that.

Relatives of the officers involved, and some of the officers themselves, deny the allegations from the memosPein doesn't address any of this.

So the story in Rathergate was not that there was a lot of faulty information out there; it's that the hard core of the story, synthesized from the input of thousands of people, each with a small piece of the puzzle, found a story that the major media was couldn't, or wouldn't.

Is this story a big smoking gun against blogs and their contribution to the reformation of the media? Only if you accept unsupported, incomplete and frankly amateurish spin presented under the imprimatur of an institution with a vested interest in upholdint the pre-blog status quo.

In other words - no.

Posted by Mitch at January 5, 2005 06:58 AM | TrackBack