Friday, September 10, 2004
CBS NEWS EXPOSED?: The problem is CBS News wanted the Bush National Guard memos to be true. In fact, the memos confirmed all of their suspicions and doubts about George W. Bush so they more or less assumed they were authentic. They got some "expert" to say they were legit and then they plowed ahead with their hit piece on President Bush.

Twenty years ago, ten years ago, even five years ago they might have gotten away with it. However, in the new information age that we live in today, driven by the blogosphere, the fraud appears to have unraveled in less than 24 hours.

Our friends over at Powerline got the ball rolling at 7:51 yesterday morning. The flood gates were fully opened when the 800lb gorilla on the internet, the DrudgeReport, linked to Scott Johnson's post on Powerline. From there the likely hoax spread like wildfire throughout the blogosphere.

Little Green Footballs and indcjournal followed up with a series of posts outlining more evidence against the CBS' documents. Before noon Jim Geraghty over at NRO's Kerry Spot asked:

I want to reserve my final judgment on this one — but the early evidence doesn't look good for CBS, or the Boston Globe.....CBS News and the Globe ought to check this out big-time, and fast. If they ran with a story based on a forgery (and a forgery that the blogosphere managed to check out in just a few hours) this report will join Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Janet Cooke in journalism's hall of infamy.

Our friend Hugh Hewitt was able to track down forensic document expert Farrell Shiver and interviewed him at length on his nationally syndicated radio show, and subsequently posted the full transcript at hughhewitt.com. And then at 7:20 EST, less than 24 hours after the original 60 Minutes exclusive ran, Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard filed: Is It a Hoax? Experts weigh in on the 60 Minutes documents. Says one: "I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but . . . I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."

This morning the front page of the Washington Post becomes the the first major paper to acknowledge the likelihood that CBS was duped. The New York Times and the Boston Globe, which ran front page stories attacking President Bush Wednesday and Thursday, citing the CBS documents, were silent on their front pages. The Globe actually ran an above the fold story titled: "Kerry Team, DNC Hit Bush on Guard Issue."

Now, to be fair this story has not been conclusively proven to have been a fraud, and there is still a chance, albeit a pretty darn small one, that CBS, the Times and the Globe have it right, and the blogosphere has it wrong. But I wouldn't be making any big bets on Old Liberal Media on this one.

We'll get in to the political dynamics of this fiasco later, if indeed it does turn out that this story is a hoax, but let's just say that after yesterday's three major polls showing Kerry trailing 4 - 9 points nationally and Gallup's state polls showing Kerry behind in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri this is not what the Kerry campaign needed. J. McIntyre 8: 33 am Link | Email | Send to a Friend