• Rather was trying to do too much, covering the Republican convention and Florida hurricanes while the Guard story was unfolding, then jetting in for single interviews rather than taking an overview on the material. Now, it's fiction that an anchor or correspondent is in charge of a story like this -- that's the job of the producer -- but at the very least he can be a moral leader. What he cares about, others have to care about, and Rather doesn't seem to have cared enough about documentation.

  • Finally, for a guy who first riled the right because of his perceived bias against Richard Nixon, Rather didn't learn the key lesson of Watergate: The coverup is worse than the crime. His CBS team played CYA for days instead of getting to the bottom of the problems with the documents. Mapes produced several segments for the Evening News trumpeting alleged new findings and new experts that supposedly corroborated the documents and the story -- they didn't -- instead of working with someone else to get to the bottom of the scandal.

    That's what seems true about what CBS did wrong. Here's what isn't true:

  • That bloggers brought down Rather. Certainly the blogosphere hastened the fact-finding process, but there were so many holes in the Guard story that it would have unraveled on its own within days. The family of the Guard leader who allegedly complained about Bush, Jerry Killian, stepped forward to dispute the story. So did other Guard sources CBS used to vouch for the documents. So did some of the document experts hired. It's worth saying that the blogosphere provided an echo chamber that gave legs to the story and kept CBS from stonewalling and hiding from the wreckage. But I think CBS's competitors would have kept on the story -- the early reporting of ABC News and the Washington Post was crucial to the final reckoning.

  • 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's Mike Krempasky, a Virginia GOP veteran of Morton Blackwell'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.

    I don't begrudge the right its newfound vigor on the Web -- and indeed, the left is learning, using blogs to publicize the mystery of Bush's mysterious back bulge during last year's debate, and more recently to bring down good old "Jeff Gannon," the faux reporter from Talon News who got a White House press pass to lob softball questions using a phony name. But activism isn't necessarily the same as journalism.

    I feel like a traitor to new media in admitting I'm a little alarmed by the glee in some corners of the blogosphere about the stumbles of the MSM, particularly CBS News and the New York Times in the wake of Rathergate and the Jayson Blair mess. In Auletta's piece about Rather, he quotes a network executive saying there's no network news without the New York Times, because the paper devotes far more resources to reporting than the networks do, and the networks frequently just grab leading Times stories for their own leads. While there might be a blogosphere without the Times and the rest of mainstream media, it's safe to say it would be enormously less important and interesting. And the blogosphere alone is incapable of providing us with a full picture of the world, or of doing the sort of long-term, often unrewarding but occasionally world-changing investigative work that blogs just can't support.

    Maybe it sounds quaint or backward looking, but at its best, the process of news gathering is expensive, it's time consuming, and it's a collective process, with reporters going off on hunches and editors reining them in and fact-checkers bringing skepticism, and in the end, some stories being killed or postponed, as CBS's Guard segment certainly should have been. The blogosphere is unlikely to completely substitute for ambitious, muscular, well-funded news organizations going after the truth all over the globe day after day. And when some bloggers at a recent Harvard conference roasted Times managing editor Jill Abramson for pointing that out, they showed their own arrogance, which we know is fatal in truth-tellers (many bloggers have told us so; just Google "Dan Rather" and arrogance). I'm rooting for the reform and reinvention and increasing relevance of the MSM; I'm not rooting for its demise.

    At the same time that Rather is stepping down, a Superior Court judge in California is deciding whether bloggers are entitled to the same protections as journalists when it comes to anonymous sources, after Apple Computer sued to discover the names of those who disclosed company information to three bloggers. I'm inclined to say they have to be, I don't know where we would draw the line, but I don't think anyone should pretend there's no complexity to the issue. It's a lot easier for, say, an Apple competitor to set up a blog to defame and undermine Apple, calling it "journalism," than to place someone inside the New York Times technology department to do the same thing. And already we see how easy it is for partisan hacks to pose as citizen journalists targeting Dan Rather or John Kerry, or President Bush, for that matter, when they're really just peddling rumors and lies.

    At their best, news and politics bloggers fuse journalism with activism and passion, like the late I.F. Stone who, with guts and determination, and armed with facts, exposed layers of corruption in politicians and institutions. Given that the media itself -- notably broadcast news and the newspaper industry -- has become another lumbering institution, often sacrificing fearlessness to the bottom line, furious bloggers, beholden only to themselves, provide a needed jolt of adrenalin. Meanwhile, let's remember that bloggers didn't do Rather or CBS in -- CBS, and to a lesser extent Rather, did.

    What the mainstream media can still offer its audience is a commitment to some version of the truth and an organization and infrastructure that goes out and finds it. Yes, CBS failed on both counts in this case, but it doesn't mean the goals aren't worth having.

    And some bloggers today only play journalists on the Web, without the commitment to fairness and accuracy that still distinguishes the best of the MSM. Just as time and timeless journalistic principles revealed the flaws in the CBS report, so too will they weed out the pretenders in the blogosphere. The truth always wins, eventually.

    This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

    • Recent Stories