Columbia Journalism Review on Rather-Gate

Article by Corey Pein.

Still putting out this type of tripe.

Consider the memos in question. They were supposed to have been written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, now dead, who supervised Bush in the Guard. We know Killian’s name was on them. We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. We don’t know through what process they wound up in the possession of a former Guardsman, Bill Burkett, who gave them to the star CBS producer Mary Mapes.

I still must be missing something on that logic. Maybe you can pass it off if you separate the idea behind the memo from the memo itself. Personally, I think that is a big stretch.

And there's arguments like this.

But CBS’s critics are guilty of many of the very same sins. First, 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.

There may have been faulty and flawed logic in the blogs. But they were never claiming that they were without bias or that they were providing "TRUTH" in this case. He seems to be missing the whole point of what the blogs did and what they are. They questioned the integrity of a major player in the MSM and provided sufficient anecdotal or circumstantial evidence to cause others in the MSM to look at what the facts really were. Some of those that brought forth evidence in the blogsphere were experts.

Go look for yourself. It's kind of long and in parts irritatingly illogical, but I guess you can't always expect logic from journalists.