LAST Wednesday night, CBS News’s flagship current affairs programme, 60 Minutes, appeared to have a splendid scoop. New documents obtained by the programme purported to show that George Bush had shirked his duty as a member of the Texas air national guard 30 years ago.
Although Democrats had been searching all year for evidence that Bush did not satisfactorily fulfil his duties, this was the first documentary proof. Four memos purportedly written by Bush’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Killian, revea
led that Killian was being pressurised to "sugarcoat" the president’s record.
They further suggested that Bush had disobeyed an order to report for a physical examination and suggested he had been reminded in no uncertain terms of the investment the air force had made in his training and that he had a moral obligation to fulfil his service to the end.
Unfortunately, for CBS and Bush’s opponents, it seems all but certain that these memos were crude forgeries, written on a modern computer using Microsoft Word while purporting to be memos written on a typewriter more than 30 years ago. The fonts, justification and kerning on the memos are precisely consistent with identical replica documents composed using a word processor - which was not, of course, available in the early 1970s.
Despite this, and despite the network’s inability to find a single expert to back their story up, CBS continues to insist the memos are genuine. By doing so, they have tarnished whatever trust the mainstream, established media still retains in the United States.
Within hours of the 60 Minutes broadcast, bloggers on the internet, initially led by the lawyers at
www.powerlineblog.com, began questioning the story.
They pointed out that the memos looked as though they had been composed upon a modern computer. Less than 12 hours later, dozens of blogs were linking to the story and conducting their own research, which, cumulatively, made CBS’s own fact-checking and research look distinctly amateurish and second-rate.
On that evening’s broadcast, Rather tried to make capital out of the bloggers’ perceived partisanship. It didn’t work. Far, far from it.
According to Rather: "Today, on the internet and elsewhere, some people - including many who are partisan political operatives - concentrated not on the key questions the overall story raised, but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."
In other words, he implied, even if the documents were false, the larger story on Bush’s service in the National Guard was true.
THIS, YOU WILL RECALL, was the same defence offered by the BBC in its defence of journalist Andrew Gilligan’s infamous report that Downing Street had "sexed-up" details of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes in the dossier presented to parliament.
Both stories fall into the classic "too good to check" category, familiar to journalists worldwide. In both cases, too, the stories neatly confirmed pre-existing assumptions held by the bien-pensant liberal media. Saddam was not a threat to anyone, ergo the Prime Minister lied his way into war; Bush shirked his duty, ergo these documents had to be genuine.
By Tuesday of this week, Rather was reduced to saying: "The documents may be a ‘he said, she said,’ but the story will stand up." This would be fine if the memos were in any way ancillary to the point CBS was claiming to make. But the memos were the heart, guts and soul of the story. When Rather is asked if the memos are genuine, he now seems to be saying: "Up to a point, Lord Copper" - just without any sense of irony, or indeed, humour.
It now transpires that even some of the document experts CBS hired to vouch for the memos authenticity had their doubts. Furthermore they expressed those doubts to CBS. As one of the experts, Emily Will, said to the Washington Post newspaper, she had told CBS she was finding "red flags" and: "If you air the programme on Wednesday, on Thursday you’re going to have hundreds of document examiners raising the same questions". Her words were prophetic.
Worse, if that were possible, Killian’s former secretary has emerged to say that though the memos may have reflected what Killian may have thought, those thoughts were not, to her knowledge, committed to paper.
"These are not real," Marian Carr Knox told the Dallas Morning News after examining copies of the memos. "They’re not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him."
But CBS’s dismissive response to the bloggers was revealing in another way. It was clear that the network resented being held accountable by, gasp, amateurs, who were not trained journalists and part of the media elite. One CBS executive dismissed bloggers as "guys who write in their pyjamas". How dare they criticise the mighty CBS!
This time, the pyjama- wearers have bitten back and they may, in the process, have dealt a grievous blow to America’s smug and self-satisfied media aristocracy.
"The blogs are relentless and loud and in real time. You can’t beat them," says Andrew Sullivan, who writes at
www.andrewsullivan.com as well as for The New Republic and Time magazine.
AS GLENN Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee and host of www.instapundit.com, puts it, in the old days, the network could have got away with it.
"CBS would have flashed the documents on TV for a few seconds and no-one would have seen them again," he says. "Even the people with doubts would have assumed that CBS had done its leg-work, as we did for years. Now we can see that such assumptions are unjustified, and indeed may always have been unjustified."
The lesson of this week has been that, in America at least, the media has been democratised. In a dizzying, energising and raucous return to the pamphleteering days of the 18th and 19th centuries, the people have, through the worldwide web and easy-to-use publishing software, been given a voice. They will not easily be silenced.
