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| Saturday, September 18, 2004 |
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Old advice never dies. As long as you can keep linking to it. 
Rather, not
| | There isn't a smoking gun on the Dan Rather/CBS case. It's more like a firing squad of machine guns that barely stop to re-load. Dan Rather's career death is starting to look like Sonny Corleone's. |
| | The first shots I heard were from talk radio, whose entire left wing is comprised of a few hosts on the likes of KGO, and the tiny, barely audible Air America (which, predictably, has nothing about the CBS Matter on its prose-packed Web site). |
| | Then I began to read around the right-led blogosphere that the documents on which CBS based its offending report (regarding George W. Bush's service record) were likely forgeries, and that CBS in any case failed to show its sources were originals. Or something like that. (Spare me the quibbles. I'm agreeing with you.) To make a long story (about my own reading) short (which it in fact is), it now seems clear to me, long after it became clear to pretty much everybody else, that CBS' fucked up rather (pun intended) royally. Look up Dan Rather on Google News, or Rathergate on Technorati, and you'll find approximately zero support for the poor man. (Sheila Lennon, whom I respect enormously, is a rare exception. I'm sure there are others; but damn few.) |
| | How do I put this to Rather: it doesn't matter if the underlying story is true. All that matters is that CBS's evidence is fake. Get it? End of story. For what it's worth: I believe Bush got into the Guard because of his dad's connections. I believe he probably didn't perform his duties adequately in his final two years. When I first read the CBS story, I thought the docs were "devastating." I'm not backing this president for re-election. But all that is completely beside the frigging point. Journalists are supposed to provide accurate evidence for their claims. CBS didn't. And its response to the critics is to stonewall and try and change the subject. The correct response - the one they'd teach you in kindergarten journalism class - is immediately to check the authenticity of the documents as best you can, and if the doubts persist, to apologize immediately and yank the story. Can you imagine what CBS News would do if a government official found to be peddling fake documents refused to acknowledge it? And kept repeating his story nonetheless? They'd be all over it. But, you see, they are above politicians. They are above criticism. And they are stratospheres above bloggers who caught them red-handed. |
| | Where I differ with him is not with any of his facts, or his arguments, but around this statement here: |
| | This story is important because the blatant flouting of basic and fundamental journalistic practices by one of the largest and prominent news organizations in the country is undermining the credibility of journalism as a whole. |
| | That credibility has never been better than every good journalist's commitment to do the best they can, under the circumstances (which usually involve constrained time and resources). Which is to say compromised, though understandably so. What's changed is the involuntary outsourcing of fact-gathering and -checking to a growing assortment of amateurs and professionals who are largely external to the profession. What we need isn't competition between blogs and mainstream news outlets, but a working symbiosis between the two. |
| | Which I think is inevitable. |
| | What will survive, ironically, will be the flag Dan Rather holds high while his voice is reduced to bubbles on the water: a commitment to The Truth behind whatever it is we say in our reporting. |
| | As important as the Gotcha! game has always been to journalism, I've always been uncomfortable with it. |
| | In 1990 D. Patrick Miller wrote a piece in The Sun called "Toward a Journalism of consciousness." In it he wrote about how, with investigative journalism, the reporter sometimes needs to gain, then betray, the trust of his sources, always for a greater good — a story the world needs to hear. Early in my own career I did an investigative report on rural poverty that led me to the same conclusion: that we sometimes employ dishonest or morally compromising means to serve what we believe to be honest and morally justifiable ends. However we put it, rationalization is involved. Such is also often the case with the Gotcha! game. Yeah, we win, but what, besides the exposed butts of those whose pants we pull down? In some cases, big things, sure. In others, not much. |
| | Ironically, winning at Gotcha! was what put 60 Minutes on the map in the first place. It's also why I've never liked the show, and why I agreed with Hal Crowther when he called the program "America's public executioner," or something like that. Hal wrote that back when Mike Wallace wore an honest hair color and grilled a fresh victim every Sunday evening. (It was a routine perfectly lampooned once on Saturday Night Live by Martin Short and Harry Shearer, who played Wallace expertly.) |
| | Right now Dan and CBS are losing the same Gotcha! game they've played for decades on 60 Minutes. I don't think that's any kind of poetic justice, or karma, or anything to cheer. It's a tragic story. |
| | Because the truths we need to know aren't just the ones Gotcha!s expose. And getting to those will take another kind of journalism: one we won't copy off TV, and we won't need to save — because we still don't have it yet. |
Going postal
| | I've been gradually moving the center of my email gravity from one platform, and client, to another. In the midst of that I've added encryption for some of my correspondents, on no less than two platforms. It's even more complicated than that, compounded by my own errors along the way. And far from over, though I have hopes we'll be done by the end of next week. |
| | Meanwhile stuff has been falling through the cracks, or drowing in the usual spam pile. |
| | If you need to reach me by email, don't use the address I usually give out here, but rather my first name @ my last name. And please use plain text. There's a better chance I'll get it that way. Thanks. |
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