Dan Rather apologises on air. Photograph: AP
CBS News has come down with a dose of Mirroritis, admitting it could not prove the authenticity of documents on which it based a story about special treatment George Bush apparently received during his stint in the Texas air national guard. Not only is there a humble apology on the network's website, but veteran anchorman Dan Rather, who presented the story, "also said personally and directly on the evening broadcast: 'I'm sorry'."
That's unlikely to satisfy the various rightwingers calling for Rather's head. The episode has even spawned its own weblog, where the prevailing opinion is that "CBS eats crow, but not nearly enough" and that there was "no apology to the President, no expression of gross incompetence. No nothing. It's a wea-culpa [sic], with a tiny little regret tossed in".
CBS and Rather don't get off any more lightly at ratherbiased.com or, for that matter, at wizbangblog, or at buzzmachine.com, where we learn "Dan Rather has plead [sic] guilty to Gross Stupidity in order to avoid a conviction for Extreme Bias in the court of public opinion".
Jay Rosen at New York University points out that: "A clerk who understood the Net, read the blogs and followed the press could have seen the danger signs accumulating day-by-day. But CBS made statements and took actions that showed a reading comprehension score near zero."
And it seems those who read the blogs, and indeed write them, are patting themselves on the back. From Attaboy we learn: "The amount of influence that the weblog community had in breaking the faked Bush memo scandal simply cannot be understated. The MSM [mainstream media] doesn't want to admit that they were out scooped by a bunch of pajama-clad shut-ins pounding out this stuff in their bedrooms. (Actually, I'm sort of in my pajamas right now, but I always write better right after I hop out of the rack)."
Adam Jay
