Making Up for Lost Time

Unfortunately, Base10 has missed commenting on the most significant story in the election so far. Some pundits are describing it as "Ra^thergate" or "Memogate." Base10 prefers the moniker with the superscripted "TH." While many others have critically analyzed this issue, Base10 still feels he should weigh in with his opinion. There is no point in describing the matter. Many much more capable bloggers have done so like Allahpundit, Powerline, Roger L. Simon and Little Green Footballs.

The memos are clearly forgeries. While some of the true believers are still arguing about it, no amount of half-hearted and patronizing statements defending the story can overcome the simple fact that these documents are clearly fake.

CBS News lied to you. This is not right-wing hyperbole. No reasonable person could give credit to these documents. In spite of being presented with these facts, CBS still ignored warnings and kept insisting that their story was true. Two major news organizations have deliberately misrepresented the truth.

Why doesn't CBS give the documents to independent experts for evaluation? The answer is obvious and equally damaging. The memos were clearly provided by the Kerry campaign. If CBS were to admit the documents were false, they would have to provide their source. (No privilege if the source is lying to you). Since they are unwilling to give up the source they must credit the story.

Before issuing a half-hearted retraction, CBS News thought that the members of their audience are stupid and that they could ride this out on the basis of their so-called reputation. What they fail to see is that their audience is smarter than they are and CBS has therefore lost all credibility and the pretense of being unbiased.

The "fake but accurate" meme is still being repeated, even by the news organizations. Don't you get it? No one cares about what hapened 35 years ago. What the public does care about is that a major news organization has become a partisan actor. It gets worse when you look at the CBS producer Mary Mapes relationship with the Kerry campaign.

There's also an issue here larger that CBS. Dozens of newspapers used to be published in New York. At some time in the fifties, television and radio caused the newspaper industry to contract. New York now has four major dailies. What happened? People started getting news from other sources. The news cycle changed and became more compressed as a result. The broadsheets couldn't keep up. This is really easy to see now, but was very difficult to see at the time if you were in the industry. You can picture editors in boardrooms saying, "Radio will never take off. People trust the papers. It's just a passing fad." Base10 thinks Dan Rather is saying this kind of thing now. What you have just witnessed is the begining of the end of "big media."

Meanwhile, Bush is still ahead.
- posted by Base10 @ 10:14 AM