September 22, 2004
IT AIN'T BRAGGIN' IF IT'S TRUE:
Citizens’ Arrest (Patrick O’Hannigan, 9/21/2004, The Spectator)
In 1998, retired Special Forces operators forced CNN to apologize for a story alleging that American troops had used nerve gas in Laos during a secret 1970 mission called Operation Tailwind. Although Special Forces alumni responding to the story used Web-based technologies to communicate with each other and with CNN, blogs did not then exist. Slandered veterans could not talk with each other in real time, or expect help from anyone outside their own circles. Nevertheless, these experts in "force multiplication" succeeded in getting the story's producer sacked.One year later, Pyra Labs added Blogger software to the collection of Internet tools already on the market. Blogger leveraged the increasing popularity of all things Web to make "asymmetrical warfare" by non-journalists against inaccuracies in Big Media easier than it had been before. Its debut set in motion a chain of events that would eventually cause CBS News and its iconic anchorman to come belatedly to grips with the idea that their own credibility had gone the way of Jonathan Livingston Seagull: lost in a painted sky, where the clouds are hung for the poet's eye, and the breaking news bites the network guy.
But Dan Rather's comeuppance is just the latest in a string of advances for "participatory journalism" that goes back to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Thousands of people discussed those attacks and their implications on the Internet, and more than a few of these people either started blogs at that time or saw their existing efforts come to sudden prominence.
We've been quite dubious of blogger triumphalism because the audience for such is so specialized and circumscribed, but the Rather story illustrated something interesting about why this factor isn't as important as it might seem: the audience includes real journalists. It was remarkable to see--especially on cable news discussions--how frequently reporters cited examples and factoids that they'd culled from their own reading on the Internet. This was especially true when the story was being driven by the arcania of typefaces and word processing quirks, which bloggers were writing about almost as 60 Minutes was displaying their fake documents. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 22, 2004 8:08 AM
'... which bloggers were writing about almost as 60 Minutes was displaying their fake documents.'
Yeah, that's what Danny Schechter (in Newsday today) is saying, except maybe without the 'almost'.
'Salon reports that the story casting doubt on the documents was first pushed into the news stream by Creative Response Concepts, a Republican public relations firm. Then, selected bloggers went to work led by an Atlanta lawyer who helped get President Bill Clinton disbarred and was the first who called the memos fakes.'
(The Creative Response business has been debunked, by the way -- an overactive PR guy trying to take credit for his client, Newsmax I think.)
Blogs do for reporters what reporters used to do for themselves -- scout around for knowledgable sources.
They supply a lot more sources, faster (when they're interested), but the reporters still have the old problem of evaluating the sources.
There was an awful lot of crap posted about the Killian letters.
I would not, I'm sure, have cottoned onto the proportional spacing clues, but as a reporter I've read a few textbooks on document and photo authentication. Not that I could do the work myself, but I understand enough of the principles to follow the argument.
I do believe I'd have spotted the memos as fakes, because of the signatures. At least one pair were identical, and that means one was copied.
One principle of document study is that signing your name is heraclitean. Nobody does it the same way twice.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 23, 2004 4:24 PM