Regardless of your political leanings, you've gotta love the outcome of the CBS/Dan Rather situation with the forged Bush Guard Memos. It turns out the bloggers were right after all. After nearly 2 weeks of gradually less adamant denials of any forgery, CBS has now discovered that the documents aren't real after all. The question here is if it was obvious to us guys in our PJ's that they were suspiscious, why didn't they get checked before the story aired? Some in the Bush Blog world would like you to believe that it's becasue of CBS's or Rather's partisanship. Perhaps, but I have to believe that the smell of a scoop that would mean bigger ratings played a bigger part. My experience with the news media suggests that truth isn't nearly as high on their priority list as ratings. Certainly not as high as all their high minded talk of 'investigative journalism' would suggest. If it will sell, use it, we'll sort out the facts later.
The cool thing for me is how the little guy has wrestled a little bit of power back from the the big news outfits. I doin't think it would have been possible, at least not from the grass roots up or with this kind of speed, in the past. Hopefully it will mean they will check their facts better next time. I doubt it.
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