September 14, 2004

Same As It Ever Was

It’s clear CBS lied to us. No, I’m not claiming they or any employee (e.g. Dan Rather) were the forgers of what are clearly forged documents. No, they lied to us about how they checked the authenticity. None of their so called experts authenticated the documents. They never did have a document expert as they claimed, and now they’re trolling blogs looking for any help they can get.

I think this is business as usual for the MSM. There was no golden age. The authority and trustworthiness on any story has always depended on the individuals doing the reporting and fact checking, not with the organization as a whole. Some people had integrity and were consciencous; other were not. Jason Blair exposed the same problems on the newspaper side that Steven Glass exposed on the magazine side that are now revealed on the network news side by RatherGate.

MSM has long been part of the trial lawyer media complex, an unholy alliance designed to win money for both trial lawyers through damage awards and journalists through advertisers. When NBC news allowed the destruction of a pickup truck to be staged using model rocket engines by trial lawyers, this connection was clearly exposed, not that anything happened beyond junior partners catching heat. The way for huge breast implant verdicts and awards was carefully paved by a media campaign that hyped non-existant dangers.

Where once reporting on social issues like gun control and abortion, or how different wars were portrayed based upon who occupied the oval office, or even economic news itself were and are slanted by the liberal views and biases of MSM, we know have a clear indication that political reporting suffers the same fate.

Trust is the only currency MSM has to spend, and for me they've spent it all. And that's terrible, we need reliable information.

UPDATE: I've been busy, but the new developments are even worse for CBS. The reason they didn't provide the names and reports of their authenticators is that the people they asked to authenticate didn't. That's right, after CBS looked into the memos for weeks the expert's verdict was not authentic. Yet CBS went ahead anyway. T hey didn't make a mistake, they lied, and they knowingly peddled a lie. Okay, CBS hasn't just spent all their trust with me, they are into me for a lot of trust.

Posted by Kevin Murphy at September 14, 2004 12:36 PM | Media Criticism
Comments
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It just illustrates yet again some of the difficulty each of us has in determining what the truth is. You can only trust so much before you get burned. Ultimately, you have to be able to judge for yourself. The over-reliance on "experts" has fueled this problem as Big Media started drinking its own bathwater and began to believe they own self-promotion.

Posted by: charles austin at September 16, 2004 9:59 AM

I wonder if the docs came to him through his daughter? He used the phrase "unimpeachable source" when asked very early on about the controversy. See http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1218004/posts for an interesting social network diagram

Posted by: Sean Murphy at September 17, 2004 8:54 PM

The comment stream from Jason Kotke's Feb 25, 2002 post on Emergengce
contains a number of prescient posts.

Kotke kicks if off with a number of strong insights:

Take the universe of weblogs as a complex system. What, if anything, is "emerging" out of that system? One possible answer is that the collective act of weblogging is producing a basic form of journalism, which you might call "bottom-up journalism" or "peer-to-peer journalism".

courtesy of anil dash's daily links for September 20.

Posted by: Sean Murphy at September 21, 2004 1:37 AM