Media Dinosaurs Endangered
by Glenn Reynolds
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September 24, 2004
DAN Rather - the biggest of big-foot news anchors at CBS, a television network regarded by many, until recently, as the premier TV news operation in the US - has had a rough couple of weeks. But they're just a harbinger of things to come, not just for Rather and CBS but for traditional left-leaning news operations across the world.
The immediate cause of Rather's travails is the almost laughably inept journalism that led to the broadcast of a story based on fraudulent documents regarding President George W. Bush's National Guard service.
Nor was the fraud hard to spot: the documents look exactly as if they were produced using a laser printer and Microsoft Word in 2004, rather than a typewriter and Liquid Paper in 1972 and 1973. CBS can't quite say where the documents came from, it failed to interview the wife and son of the (conveniently deceased) purported author, who say that the documents are forgeries, and it ignored the evidence of document experts who told them the papers were almost certainly fraudulent.
Not surprisingly, within hours of the documents being placed on the internet, people were raising questions. And it's a testament to the cluelessness of the old journalists -- members of what people on the internet like to call "legacy media" -- that they were more suspicious of the rapidity with which these questions appeared than of the documents. Post obviously bogus documents on the internet and find people asking questions about them within hours -- it must be a conspiracy!
In fact, it was the power of open-source journalism. CBS, like most broadcast networks in the US -- and, for some reason, just about everywhere else -- is staffed by people who lean Left and who don't like Bush. That makes them disposed to find even obviously bogus claims about Bush (such as the oft-repeated story that he served US troops in Iraq a plastic turkey on his visit last year, an exploded claim that Australian journalist-blogger Tim Blair gleefully points out whenever it resurfaces) credible, despite the evidence.
Worse yet, they tend to talk mostly with people who share their beliefs. The result is an insular culture, rife with the prejudices of the New Class, which believes all sorts of absurdities and peddles them to the public in the sometimes honest, if often unfounded, belief that they are true. Even when they are exposed as false, the response is often to assert, as Rather did for a while, that the story may have been false, but that it was justified because the underlying point (people who agree with us are good, while people who don't are bad) is nonetheless true. After all, everyone they talk to thinks so.
Not long ago, CBS probably would have got away with it. The documents would have flashed on the screen for two or three seconds, a few readers might have scratched their heads and remarked, "those sure look like they were done on Microsoft Word", and perhaps a few comments would have been exchanged around water coolers, to no effect. Most people would have assumed that CBS had done a thorough investigation and that their idle suspicions were just that.
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But not any more. Now the cocoon has broken. With the documents on the internet, tens of thousands of people, with expertise in everything from computer typesetting to early 1970s military jargon were able to look at the memos, form their own opinions and communicate them widely. CBS had a staff of (perhaps) dozens working on these documents -- not very hard, obviously -- for a few weeks. After the broadcast, however, tens of thousands of people were looking at the documents, bringing far more man-hours, and apparently far more scepticism and expertise, to bear. As Bryan Curtis wrote in Slate: "CBS spent less time verifying the Guard documents than most bloggers."
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If there's an analogy to this phenomenon, it's probably the open-source software movement, which tends to produce far more reliable products via the same process of distributed criticism and relative freedom from groupthink. But I'm afraid that the internet's threat to cocooned old-media organisations is far greater than the threat that Microsoft poses to Linux.
That's because writing software is hard. Journalism -- particularly journalism practised as it's practised at CBS (or as the similarly humiliating Andrew Gilligan affair demonstrates, at the BBC) is easy. Those who have lived within the comfortable big-media cocoon have done so not because they possess unusual talents, but because they have had access to the tools for disseminating news and opinion, tools that were until recently so expensive that only a favoured few could use them. They had the megaphone; the rest of us did not.
Those days are over. Nowadays everyone has a megaphone and those with something interesting to say often discover that their megaphone can become very large, very fast. Meanwhile, those in the legacy media are discovering that their megaphones are shrinking as the result of journalistic self-abuse. With the tools now available to everyone, the biggest asset is credibility, something they have already squandered in the belief that no one would know the difference.
Nor is this phenomenon likely to be limited to the US. The Gilligan affair, and the attitudes and behaviours it exposed, has seriously wounded the credibility of the BBC, and there seems no reason to think that other broadcasters across the world, whether state-affiliated or merely oligopolistic, are likely to do any better. As always happens when the comfortable are afflicted by competition, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth at this phenomenon. But given the performance of these dinosaurs over recent decades, there seems little reason to mourn the change.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee, publishes the InstaPundit.com weblog.
___________________
September 24, 2004
DAN Rather - the biggest of big-foot news anchors at CBS, a television network regarded by many, until recently, as the premier TV news operation in the US - has had a rough couple of weeks. But they're just a harbinger of things to come, not just for Rather and CBS but for traditional left-leaning news operations across the world.
The immediate cause of Rather's travails is the almost laughably inept journalism that led to the broadcast of a story based on fraudulent documents regarding President George W. Bush's National Guard service.
Nor was the fraud hard to spot: the documents look exactly as if they were produced using a laser printer and Microsoft Word in 2004, rather than a typewriter and Liquid Paper in 1972 and 1973. CBS can't quite say where the documents came from, it failed to interview the wife and son of the (conveniently deceased) purported author, who say that the documents are forgeries, and it ignored the evidence of document experts who told them the papers were almost certainly fraudulent.
Not surprisingly, within hours of the documents being placed on the internet, people were raising questions. And it's a testament to the cluelessness of the old journalists -- members of what people on the internet like to call "legacy media" -- that they were more suspicious of the rapidity with which these questions appeared than of the documents. Post obviously bogus documents on the internet and find people asking questions about them within hours -- it must be a conspiracy!
In fact, it was the power of open-source journalism. CBS, like most broadcast networks in the US -- and, for some reason, just about everywhere else -- is staffed by people who lean Left and who don't like Bush. That makes them disposed to find even obviously bogus claims about Bush (such as the oft-repeated story that he served US troops in Iraq a plastic turkey on his visit last year, an exploded claim that Australian journalist-blogger Tim Blair gleefully points out whenever it resurfaces) credible, despite the evidence.
Worse yet, they tend to talk mostly with people who share their beliefs. The result is an insular culture, rife with the prejudices of the New Class, which believes all sorts of absurdities and peddles them to the public in the sometimes honest, if often unfounded, belief that they are true. Even when they are exposed as false, the response is often to assert, as Rather did for a while, that the story may have been false, but that it was justified because the underlying point (people who agree with us are good, while people who don't are bad) is nonetheless true. After all, everyone they talk to thinks so.
Not long ago, CBS probably would have got away with it. The documents would have flashed on the screen for two or three seconds, a few readers might have scratched their heads and remarked, "those sure look like they were done on Microsoft Word", and perhaps a few comments would have been exchanged around water coolers, to no effect. Most people would have assumed that CBS had done a thorough investigation and that their idle suspicions were just that.
_______________________________
But not any more. Now the cocoon has broken. With the documents on the internet, tens of thousands of people, with expertise in everything from computer typesetting to early 1970s military jargon were able to look at the memos, form their own opinions and communicate them widely. CBS had a staff of (perhaps) dozens working on these documents -- not very hard, obviously -- for a few weeks. After the broadcast, however, tens of thousands of people were looking at the documents, bringing far more man-hours, and apparently far more scepticism and expertise, to bear. As Bryan Curtis wrote in Slate: "CBS spent less time verifying the Guard documents than most bloggers."
____________________________
If there's an analogy to this phenomenon, it's probably the open-source software movement, which tends to produce far more reliable products via the same process of distributed criticism and relative freedom from groupthink. But I'm afraid that the internet's threat to cocooned old-media organisations is far greater than the threat that Microsoft poses to Linux.
That's because writing software is hard. Journalism -- particularly journalism practised as it's practised at CBS (or as the similarly humiliating Andrew Gilligan affair demonstrates, at the BBC) is easy. Those who have lived within the comfortable big-media cocoon have done so not because they possess unusual talents, but because they have had access to the tools for disseminating news and opinion, tools that were until recently so expensive that only a favoured few could use them. They had the megaphone; the rest of us did not.
Those days are over. Nowadays everyone has a megaphone and those with something interesting to say often discover that their megaphone can become very large, very fast. Meanwhile, those in the legacy media are discovering that their megaphones are shrinking as the result of journalistic self-abuse. With the tools now available to everyone, the biggest asset is credibility, something they have already squandered in the belief that no one would know the difference.
Nor is this phenomenon likely to be limited to the US. The Gilligan affair, and the attitudes and behaviours it exposed, has seriously wounded the credibility of the BBC, and there seems no reason to think that other broadcasters across the world, whether state-affiliated or merely oligopolistic, are likely to do any better. As always happens when the comfortable are afflicted by competition, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth at this phenomenon. But given the performance of these dinosaurs over recent decades, there seems little reason to mourn the change.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee, publishes the InstaPundit.com weblog.
Comments
On my drive down from Penryn yesterday, I listened to a lot of Bloggers toot their horns and presage the demise of the "elite media"
Let's get something straight, history of our country was one of very partisan press. The Alien & Sedition Acts ring a bell.
What Dan Rather and CBS allowed to happen was probably very damaging to Kerry amd they should be ashamed.
You assume that the media is completely left wing, which it is not.
But what is the alternative. The mammals: Bloggers, the Fair and Balanced News Network, Limbaugh, Savage, O'Reilly, et al.
Even if Rather is more liberal leaning than Bill O'Reilly, and I hate that term as though it were a social disease, Rather, CBS and the main stream media pounded on Clinton. The guy in the oval office is supposed to get skewered. That's why we have a press.
Right wing media eats its own young for stepping out of line. They are not critical and they tend to throw total garbage and rumor on the air so frequently that it's like the kid crying wolf. AMD THEY NEVER APOLOGIZE!
Let's see, Clinton murdered Foster, illegally fired the travel office staff, stole FBI files, was a crook for investing in a failed real estate venture, murdered hundreds of people, was invovled in drug dealing in Arkansas, blah blah blah.
And how did they do it..... they quoted some blogger or another blogger or Gerry Falwell or some other nut bar. They do no backgroud, no independent sources.... In other words, they did the same thing as Rather.....
However, they don't apologize, they don't concede they are wrong, they just parrot what every Rovian lackey tells them to say and act as though they hurt no one.
David Bell has frequently noted that the Starr investigation proved nothing except that Clinton did have some sort or relations with that woman. Then like most husbands, he lied about it. It cost the country millions, but that wasn't the real cost.
The entire country refused to deal with real issues like Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. To the Republicans, these were wag-the-dog wars. The boming of OBL's training facility was Wag-the-dog, the "asprin" factory...more wag-the-dog. And as a result many of us liberals hold the REPUBLICAN PARTY personally responsible for the Clinton adminstration unwillingness to implement the Richard Clarke plan to attack OBl where he was hanging out.
The unelected president hung out in Crawford doing nothing about terrorism until one day, boom "the world has changed".
I digress.
We, the American people need a "main stream press" to filter the bullshit on both sides and each other. Is the Washington Post part of that liberal elite media? They have hammered on Rather and CBS. It is not as though the right wing and the bloggers were the only ones questioning the Rather piece.
It's just that the rightwing press and bloggers are poised like vultures to jump on any story unfavorable to the unelected president and will have a counter story out before you and I have had our coffee in the morning. In other words, I don't think more truth is coming forth as a result of the new mammalss competing with the old dinosaurs, I just think more information is coming out alot faster because of the internet.
So turn off you TV and stop reading the newspaper if you like, and just listen to one rightwing news sources so you will KNOW THE TRUTH. Cause they are "fair and balanced." But if you don't listen to divergent points of view, you might find that you have been eaten by the mammals.
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The main point of the Reynolds argument, I thought, was that if a networld posts documents that are obviously forged, fifteen thousand fact checkers, many expert at diverse fields such as computers, typography and document verification, plus military history, etc. will find out the truth. This is true whether the documents are liberal or conservative. This seems like a good thing to me.
The Internet is certainly not conservative or liberal, it is both.
I don't have the patience to watch network news: it is too inefficient. You get ten minutes of news in thirty minutes, not to mention that it is slanted.
I read my local newspaper and the Wall Street Journal. Plus the Internet (Google news, Reuters, etc.) provides instantaneous news all day long. I look at Blogs (like Mr. Reynolds at Instapundit.com) to find various sites collected for my easy viewing.
Fox news and AM radio provide entertainment in the form of debate programs or people like Limbaugh who provides a point of view in an entertaining manner.
The more news the better. The good part is that there is no monopoly on the news. We have choices. That is an improvement. The network news will continue, but it becomes increasingly irrelevant. It is easy to find a wealth of information on any question that interest me. Yippee.
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