Bloggers are claiming their first scalp. But the old media isn't dead yet -- and the new media can never replace it.
It's reflexive, irresistible: When Dan Rather says goodbye Wednesday night, some trend watchers will tell us it marks the end of one form of media -- big media, corporate media, old media and, according to some, liberal media -- and the emergence of a new one, ruled by a populist, disintermediated chorus of citizen journalists who live in something that's been badly labeled "the blogosphere."
We all know the narrative: Within hours of Rather's Sept. 8 "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment, on allegations that President Bush got special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, bloggers began unraveling the story, pointing particularly to problems in key source documents that seemed to indicate they were forgeries. (Problems that came to light, ironically, when CBS posted the documents on the Internet, where they could be instantly scrutinized by millions.)
It's an Internet success story and we want to believe it. We love Internet success stories because we are one! (That's the cardinal rule of the blogosphere -- transparency cures all ills! Let your biases hang out!) But it's not the whole truth.
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# The other fiction is that "citizen journalists" alone brought down Rather. In fact, the bloggers behind Rathergate -- starting with Rathergate.com -- were a mixed bag of independent citizens and scrappy document hounds alongside veteran right-wing activists with ties to all sorts of conservative causes. In the American Prospect this week Garance Franke-Ruta lays out the pedigree of Rathergate.com founder Mike Krempasky, a Virginia GOP veteran of Morton Rockwell's right-wing leadership training institute who currently works for conservative mastermind Richard Viguerie. Trashing Rather has been a cause on the right going back to the '70s. The late Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media popularized the slogan "CBS: Rather Biased"; it was picked up by some young conservative bloggers at RatherBiased.com in 2000, and they rode it to Rather's retirement. The right fused its old-politics infrastructure of rabid Rather-haters to new-media bloggers to make sure the story found its legs.
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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/09/rather/index.html