Over at Slate, Jack Shafer critiques Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham’s new 7,700-word editorial about the Republican propaganda machine. It’s not as exciting as Bernard Hopkins and the beans-and-rice incident, but it still makes for good reading.
Meanwhile, the bigger media scandal involves CBS’s use of likely-forged documents to attack the president’s National Guard record. It’s interesting to me because — in addition to the ideological bias involved, and the fact that Dan Rather and a CBS news exec are now contending that the contents of the memos are accurate, even if false (which is tantamount to the police saying, “Sure, we faked the evidence, but he’s guilty of something“) — it illustrates the power of the internet.
A bunch of venues have picked up the story that certain bloggers were the first people to publicize the possibility (now high probability) that these documents were incredibly crude forgeries that couldn’t have been generated using available technology of the time. Sidestepping the politics of the case (the standard “Does Dan Rather have a grudge against Bush’s family?”), it’s this aspect of it that I find fascinating. In short order, a new form of media has emerged, bypassing traditional gatekeepers, making tons of mistakes, but also offering perspectives and expertise that Big Media simply can’t match.
It’s like emergent architecture, where a bazillion little units start gestalt-ifying into a mosaic that represents reality far better than the top-down model of Big Media.