Columbia Journalism Review has a follow-up story on the case of the Killian memos -- the memos given to CBS as part of their overall story on Bush not meeting his minimum commitments in the Texas Air National Guard. No new information, really, but a decent summary of how the story unfolded and where it currently sits.
Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that's mainstream media to you). But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule. On September 8, just weeks before the presidential election, 60 Minutes II ran a story about how George W. Bush got preferential treatment as he glided through his time in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was anchored on four memos that, it turns out, were of unknown origin. By the time you read this, the independent commission hired by the network to examine the affair may have released its report, and heads may be rolling. Dan Rather and company stand accused of undue haste, carelessness, excessive credulity, and, in some minds, partisanship, in what has become known as "Memogate."
But CBS's critics are guilty of many of the very same sins. First, much of the bloggers' vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers' lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.
That pretty much sums it up, for me.
To explain to newer posters: I have an interest in this story, since I did an extensive series on it at the time. DailyKos was one of the very few sites that did any serious counterinvestigation into the claims that the documents were word-processed forgeries, through this story and multiple followups, and found that the right-wing blog "forgery!" claims could be disproved pretty easily.
So where does the story sit now?
Ultimately, we don't know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were "apparently bogus" (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather's resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.
Yeah, about there. To this day, the evidence is inconclusive; the documents bear good evidence of being typewritten, when you look at the higher-resolution documents initially published by CBS (they quickly posted smaller, more pixellated versions in an apparent attempt to save bandwidth, which is the version of the docs most "proofs" of forgery relied on), but no one has been able to positively identify the actual typewriter used. And nobody is really trying, in either direction, at this point.
Far from being a case of deserved blog triumphalism, I largely think of the Killian memos case as being a prime example of the failure of blogs to act as anything resembling reliable conduits of information. A number of right-wing blogs continue to cite the story, to this day, as evidence that they "outdid" conventional journalism: in reality, they didn't do much at all -- the initial claims were planted by a Republican political operative, their actual evidence didn't hold much water, and the whole thing was more screaming match than anything that could be considered "journalism", even by modern, limp-wristed journalism standards. But the case was a spectacular demonstration of the coordination between an assortment of rather foul far-right blogs and their more mainstream media "keepers". From small sites like LGF or Powerline, on to middle vendors like Drudge or Hugh Hewitt, on to Hannity, Limbaugh and O'Reilly, the story made its way as quickly and smoothly as if on rails.
The case also highlighted the astonishing lack of actual investigative capabilities by mainstream media outlets, as they did largely nothing except echo claims and counterclaims according to what the loudest voices told them. Journalists, producers, right-wing bloggers, lefty bloggers -- in the end, the only victor was the White House, which still is enjoying the temporary reprieve from increasingly solid evidence that not only was Bush almost certainly absent without leave for a goodly portion of his Vietnam-era National Guard duty, but that his records had been subsequently purged and otherwise tampered with by his campaign in an attempt to hide the fact.