Fact Checking The Asses

Via the Poorman I see that the Columbia Journalism Review does a little fact checking on the fact checkers in the glorious blogospheric triumph of “Memogate.” The kerning sleuth’s scoops were actually inferior to the average newsflash in the Weekly World News, but in these heady days of faux internet journalism, as pioneered by our own William Paley — Drudge — it ranks right up there with “Monica’s talking points” for making utter fools of the mediawhores. That in itself is a triumph since they are so good at making fools of themselves.

…much of the bloggers’ vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers’ lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.

[…]

Would-be gumshoes typed up documents on their computers and fooled around with the images in Photoshop until their creation matched the originals. Someone remembered something his ex-military uncle told him, others recalled the quirks of an IBM typewriter not seen for twenty years. There was little new evidence and lots of pure speculation. But the speculation framed the story for the working press.

The very first post attacking the memos — nineteen minutes into the 60 Minutes II program — was on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com by an active Air Force officer, Paul Boley of Montgomery, Alabama, who went by the handle “TankerKC.” Nearly four hours later it was followed by postings from “Buckhead,” whom the Los Angeles Times later identified as Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta. (MacDougald refused to tell the Times how he was able to mount a case against the documents so quickly.) Other blogs quickly picked up the charges. One of the story’s top blogs, Rathergate.com, is registered to a firm run by Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative fund-raiser. Some were fed by the conservative Media Research Center and by Creative Response Concepts, the same p.r. firm that promoted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. CRC’s executives bragged to PR Week that they helped legitimize the documents-are-fake story by supplying quotes from document experts as early as the day after the report, September 9. The goal, said president Greg Mueller, was to create a buzz online while at the same time showing journalists “it isn’t just Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge who are raising questions.”

Doggonnit to heck. And after all those false tips during the Clinton years. Whodda thunk that liberul media would get taken again?

There was actually a big story of blogospheric triumph this year that the mediawhores have conveniently ignored since they weren’t spoonfed the delicious details by their trusted RNC sources.(They’re very busy.) It was the story of a big media player being forced to back off a plan to air partisan propaganda as news in the waning days of the presidential campaign when the internet organized a boycott that made it’s way to institutional Wall Street investors and snowballed into a precipitous stock dive. But that’s a very dull story that didn’t feature even one adorable tale of an intrepid blogger cracking the DaVinci Code in his pyjamas. Who cares?

The Poorman notes another real blogospheric reportorial triumph with serious real life consequences. Not that it matters.