BUSH RECORDS CBS concession shows power of the bloggers

Web logs act as a watchdog on the mainstream press.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Scott Johnson took a bite out of CBS' "60 Minutes" and came away with 15 minutes of fame.
Johnson, a Minneapolis lawyer with a political Web site called Power Line, proved to be instrumental in challenging the authenticity of documents CBS used to impugn George W. Bush's record in the National Guard.
On Sept. 9, the morning after CBS aired its report about Bush, Johnson updated his blog with comments from readers who believed that the documents -- reportedly written 32 years ago -- were forgeries. Questioning everything from the memos' military jargon to whether a 1970s typewriter could have produced the "proportionally spaced fonts" on the documents, the blog (short for Web log) soon drew the attention of other bloggers -- and the mainstream press.
Twelve days later, after intense research by print and TV journalists, CBS conceded that it couldn't vouch for the documents' authenticity.
Its Monday admission deals a blow to the credibility of CBS News and anchor Dan Rather, who had defended his "60 Minutes" report. But the episode has jolted the press establishment in another way: It served notice that there's an aggressive new watchdog in town, in the form of thousands of bloggers willing -- even eager -- to question, nitpick or attack reports in the mainstream press.
For the most part, political blogs act as forums for armchair pundits to deliver often-partisan commentary. But because blogs link to one another with comments and feedback, the buzz around one story can attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of blog readers, who in turn can offer "on the spot" knowledge or expertise. In the CBS case, bloggers raised the initial doubts, analyzed each new wrinkle and occasionally did original reporting, scooping the professionals.
"What this story illustrates is the power of the blogs as a medium for the transmission of information," said Johnson, who can now claim to have made the cover of this week's Time magazine -- if only because the back of his head is visible in a photo collage featuring Rather.
"My efforts were to act as a clearinghouse for the circulation of information," which was then subjected to confirmation, he said.
It's no standard
To some, that's hardly a viable journalistic standard.
"We can't be too quick to equate the bona fides and journalistic chops of a blogger with that of any mainstream media organization," said Christopher Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News. "The bloggers do not have any system of checks and balances. My issue is simply when we start elevating these journals of opinion to the level of newspapers of record, so to speak."
Other critics have complained that blogs can traffic in rumor, such as a claim in February that Sen. John Kerry had had an affair with a former intern.
Responding to the criticism, Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee behind the Instapundit blog, says the online community acts as its own ombudsman to sift fact from allegation.
"The check on blogs is other blogs," he said. "Because blogs operate in a reputation-based environment, nobody minds a bias. But they expect you to be honest about your facts. And if you get a reputation for not being honest about your facts, people pay lots of attention to you."
Getting praise
Since the CBS furor, the blogging community has been showered with accolades in opinion pages and editorials. Still, it's premature to start awarding Pulitzer prizes to the laptop set. Professional journalists have been the ones consulting experts and following up promising leads.
"I would argue that we were able to do a few things that blogs were not," said Christopher Isham, chief of investigative projects at ABC News, one of the first news outlets to challenge CBS's documents.
Still, a perception exists among some bloggers -- and among many news consumers -- that without blogs the press wouldn't have picked up the story.
Not so, said Dan Gillmor, author of "We the Media" and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. "People upset about the documents and raising questions would have been on the phone to every reporter they could get on the phone to."
One advantage the bloggers did have was speed.
The "60 Minutes" report produced photocopies of documents reportedly written by the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush's commander in the Air Texas National Guard, saying that he was being pressured to "sugar coat" Bush's record.
Within hours of Rather's report, hundreds of laptop users were scrutinizing the memos posted on CBS's Web site.
Suspected forgery
Charles Johnson, a blogger in Los Angeles with an expertise in typography, suspected forgery: The documents looked too contemporary. He typed one of the memos into a Microsoft Word document -- using the program's default settings -- and found that the CBS documents were an exact match. He sent Power Line a link to his findings at LittleGreenFootballs.com.
By noon, Bill Ardolino of the INDC Journal blog had seen the Power Line stories and interviewed a typeface expert. The expert's doubts about the memos appeared that day on Ardolino's blog.
And, like a champion bingo player, Power Line was also first to shout out that Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, the man who supposedly pressured Killian in a memo dated 1973, had retired a year and a half earlier.
The information bloggers brought to bear on the issue was impressive, said ABC's Isham, who reads several blogs a day. "In fairness to the blogs, I think [they were] the first thing that tipped us off that there might have been a problem -- because they were on it right away," he said.