Cecil pointed out to me that we haven’t really kept up with the latest weblogs- meet- the-power-of-many storyline in which legions of skeptical bloggers took down the mighty Dan Rather and CBS over the AWOLgate forged documents.
He’s probably right and I shouldn’t let my pinko biases keep me from acknowledging a situation where the bloggers once again got the better of established media and exposed some of its flaws and blind spots.
Personally, I was never convinced by most of the typographical analyses of the many-times-copied documents, but agnostic wasn’t where the action was on this story.
Lefties have been pointing out that some of the bloggers who were on the story right away appear to be Republican operatives and conspiracy theories within conspiracy theories have been spawned to explain the whole thing as a diabolical ratf*cking.
The whole thing has been discussed all over the blogosphere, not just the right coast of it, but as is often the case, Jay Rosen has put out some of the best media analyses, such as this one (Did the President of CBS News Have Anyone in Charge of Reading the Internet and Sending Alerts?):
My initial statement on the CBS surrender: 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. The outside reviewers should pick up the plot from there. But who gets appointed: only insiders? [PressThink]