The blogscussion over the CBS Killian documents has moved from the initial story — Are the documents forgeries? — to the meta story — Did the blogosphere or “pajama brigade,” as some are now referring to it, break the story? On the side, three camps seem to be emerging: Those who consider the documents already debunked; those who don’t; and those who find previous evidence about George Bush’s Alabama absences far more damning than anything in the Killian memos or the CBS report.
Lefty bloggers aren’t buying all the crowing. Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog fills us in: “You probably aren’t aware of this if you don’t lurk at right-wing web sites, but the questioning of those National Guard documents doesn’t just make conservatives think they’ve caught Dan Rather and CBS with egg on their faces — it makes them think they are on the verge of destroying the entire established media universe.” Noting that the New York Times and New Republic survived Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, respectively, Steve M. lashes out at the pajama brigade, “Like their god George Bush on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln declaring ‘Mission Accomplished,’ these people are premature self-congratulators, and they have a laughably overcaffeinated sense of their own importance.”
Matthew Yglesias agrees, offering a simple explanation: “After CBS ran the story, the conservative side of the ‘sphere came up with dozens of purported debunkings of their authenticity, almost all of which turned out to be more purported than debunking. Then after a few days of back-and-forth, traditional reporters at the Washington Post came out with a more careful, more accurate, more actually-debunking story.” Yglesias offers a fantastic hypothetical: “If I do a post tomorrow claiming — utterly without evidence — that John Ashcroft is a closeted homosexual and then two weeks later a New York Times reporter unearths (non-forged) photos of Ashcroft with his gay lover, did I ‘break’ the Gay Ashcroft story? No, I didn’t.” (Better hope the folks over at BlogActive don’t catch wind of this.)
Discount Blogger concedes some ground to Yglesias’ argument, but ultimately sticks to his position: “While by Matthew’s strict definition, bloggers may not have broken the story, they were absolutely the reason the story got broken immediately (like, say, before the election.) Without them speaking up, and without the Drudge link, I doubt the media would have paid a whole lot of attention to it.” Furthermore, Discount Blogger continues, “The big story here though is not so much that bloggers broke it — which they clearly did, but that they showed how easily Rather and company could have proven the memos were fake in the first place. And they did it on a budget of (drum roll) $0.”
Hindrocket, (who’s taken a liking to the term “pajama brigade”) writing from Powerline, a site partially-credited with “breaking” the story, reviews this morning’s Los Angeles Times editorial, in which the paper declares that “CBS has been had.” The editorial continues: “CBS’ real error was trying to prove a point that didn’t really need to be proved” — that Bush pulled strings to get into the Guard. This conclusion dismays Hindrocket. “Really?” he asks. “Why not? The Times says it doesn’t take documents to show that Bush ‘pulled strings to get into the National Guard,’ but the fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever, documentary or otherwise, of such string-pulling.” (Apparently Hindrocket missed the Ben Barnes segment of the CBS broadcast, which preceded the Killian document presentation — not to mention numerous reports from last February confirming what has come to be known as the Alabama Absence.)
Maybe it’s time to change out of those pajamas and get some fresh air.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.