Dan Rather and the Truth

[thedrifter]

Dan Rather and the Truth
Written by Gregory Borse
Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Dan Rather and his senior producer, Mary Mapes, implicated in the now infamous attempt by CBS’ 60 Minutes II to perpetuate a fraud upon the American public regarding President Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War through the use of faked memos which purported to “prove” that he shirked his duty and benefited from his connections, continue to reveal the lengths to which they will go to protect their reputations and to establish that the story they told—although unsupported by the facts—was, nonetheless “accurate.”

From Matthew Sheffield at Newsbusters.com there’s this:

[Dan] Rather also expressed suspicion about bloggers' role in publicizing CBS’s mistakes in the whole Memogate affair.

"There are some strange, and to me, still mysterious things, certainly unexplained things that happened about how it got attacked and why, even before the program was over," Rather said, adding that his network was derelict in not "knowing enough of how quickly bloggers could strike."

“The anchor appeared to have softened his attitudes toward some (unnamed) web authors but remained suspicious about ‘those bloggers who were partisan politically affiliated and/or had an ideological axe to grind with us’ in the exposition of the document scandal” (go here).

From Powerlineblog.com there’s this regarding the forthcoming book by Mary Mapes on the CBS 60 Minutes II forged documents fiasco. Following the infamous broadcast,

“Mapes returns with her ‘senior document analyst’ Marcel Matley in tow. She celebrates the broadcast of her expose of the never-before-told misconduct of the incumbent president. She’s riding the wave of yet another professional triumph. Then a pall sets in:

‘All that changed about 11:00 a.m., when I first started hearing rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far right Web sites were saying that the documents had been forged.

‘I was incredulous. That couldn’t be possible. Even on the morning the story aired, when we showed the president’s people the memos, the White House hadn’t attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.

‘Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

‘All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators--or whatever they were--were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement’” (go here).

There was something of an echo-chamber, no doubt. That happens every moment on the Internet—especially in forums and especially in those forums dedicated to discussions between like-minded and like-spirited souls strangely passionate enough to discuss ad-nauseam the objects of their own fascination. It’s as apt a description of the Daily Kos as it is of FreeRepublic—and its reality is one that establishment media has been too slow to appreciate.

Nearly a month before the 60 Minutes II fiasco, Fred Turner described the dangers of misunderstanding the new media in an entry at TechCentralStation on 8/19/2004:

The "mainstream press" may be in the process of squandering a precious resource that its leaders no longer have the institutional memory to recognize as the source of its legitimacy and its living. In the last few years -- essentially since 9/11 plunged us into a new world, a new agenda, that the press did not understand -- the major organs of civilized journalism, once trusted by the billion most effective people on the planet, have given away their credibility upon a trifle.

Everybody now recognizes that such voices as CNN, the New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, the major TV networks, the New Yorker, the Guardian, etcetera, are . . . the express and all-but-explicit advocates of a very special point of view, one with specific political goals. Those goals are certainly different from those of al-Jazeera or the socialist press, but they are in their own way as coherent, exclusive, and unquestioned.

. . . The journalistic Boomers themselves, who had often been trained by scholars who believed that there might be truth about a state of affairs that could be closely approached if not fully attained, usually knew when they were bending the truth and spinning for political advantage. Their leftist principles taught them that objectivity was desirable in the abstract and might again become feasible and desirable once the inequities of society were resolved. In any case, they felt, one should not lightly fritter away the legacy of credibility built up since the Enlightenment by the great authoritative institutions of civilization -- science, historiography, the serious newspapers, the great museums, the courts, and so on. But their younger followers and employees, postmodernist in belief-system, educated by ideologically relativist and politically correct junior professors, and increasingly deprived of the basics in logic, ethics, and inductive reasoning by their specialist education, were no longer capable of making any distinction between what was true and what was conducive to their social ideals.

Thus the scandals associated with such violators of journalistic trust as Howell Raines and Jayson Blair of the New York Times, Andrew Gilligan of the BBC, and Eason Jordan of CNN (who confessed that CNN had been going easy on Saddam Hussein for many years, with the implication that CNN had helped prepare a public attitude of sympathy for his regime and anger at the UN sanctions) are but the tip of the iceberg. Studies have shown that the huge majority of journalists and professors are liberal Democrats; no cause for alarm in itself, but troubling when the brakes of traditional critical analysis have been disabled, as they were by the deconstructionist ideology of the schools. And the general reader is beginning to realize that there is indeed a systematic bias in the traditional news media.

continued...

[thedrifter]

Part of the problem has been the rise in the popular interactive media -- talk radio and the Internet -- of an unabashedly ideological counter-movement on the Right. There is a long tradition in both Europe and the US of such partisan advocacy -- it used to be called "pamphleteering" and is a recognized and honorable part of a free and democratic society. It is a tradition that recognizes the distinction between opinion and fact, and bills itself honestly as opinion. Since the collapse of sympathy for communist and socialist causes throughout the nation when the abuses and lies of the old Soviet Union were revealed, there had been a depressing paucity of such pamphleteering from the Left, and what there was seemed pallid and bereft of ideas. In frustration, I believe, many young journalists in the great organs of record, rejecting the fact/opinion distinction, turned to the idea of using their new command over the means of information production to fight back. Remembering their professors' nostalgic stories of Vietnam protest, and indulgently encouraged by their Boomer editors, they took the war in Iraq as the ideal occasion for a counter-attack. They had a villain from Texas with an accent and an apparent ignorance of university manners, the smoldering resentments of the Florida recount, a wealth of horrific footage supplied by al Jazeera, and an expertise in spin provided both by their rhetoric professors and by the advertising profession (laundered through political campaign strategizing). How could they fail?” (go here)

He followed up with this—it’s actually about the Rather scandal.

He got it right—before and after.

What we are seeing now from Rather and Mapes is the blinkered-apoplexy of an institution as it attempts to come to understand its failure to manage a reality it thought that it had succeeded in thoroughly owning. Hawthorne gave us Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter as something of an early type of those who are seduced (by themselves, no less) into believing their own press.

What Turner has succeeded in illustrating is that the institutional media had so thoroughly begun to believe its own authority that it is succumbing now to the reality identified by Thomas Kuhn for cultures on the edge of the bursting of their own bubble. Cultures fail not at that point at which they can no longer provide the right answers, they fail when they can no longer ask the right questions. I do not mean that the failure of CBS in this instance is anything like a general failure of culture—but it is an indication of the failure of CBS and the Mainstream Media itself. It is due not only from lack of imagination, but from the root cause, as ever, of every failure of imagination recorded in Western Civilization—hubris.

And this is what undoubtedly happened with the Dan Rather story about President Bush. Rather now suspects that some nefarious something constitutes the reason for the aftermath of the story he pursued with such fervor. I have no doubt that even today Mr. Rather believes what he believed then was true. The problem is now that in the face of evidence so incontrovertible that even his wranglers at CBS will not allow him to do a follow-up, that Rather is convinced of some Michael Moorish conspiracy (no doubt one that reaches all the way to a Simpsons-esque dark and stormy Halliburton Castle-on-a-cliff boardroom) by conservatives to prevent the truth coming to light.

Mary Mapes’ words in her forthcoming work are no less revealing. She speaks of websites she’s “never heard of” as the sources of a kind of unlooked for suffering in a way that illustrates her ignorance of the changing landscape of information gathering and dissemination—as if during her five-year pursuit of the Bush Air-Guard story she’s been living in a kind of cocoon.

It seems that no one at CBS (and at other MSM institutions) took seriously the burgeoning of the Internet and what Michael Ong called the “new orality” –an arising as the result of new technology of consciousness; one comfortable at once with the fluidity of speech while at the same time making instantaneous claims to “authority” on the grounds of writing. Yet CBS relied on this very phenomenon for its story. To wit: The written image of the supposedly authentic memos themselves (on screen during the 60 Minutes II segment, and on the CBS website shortly after the program aired) were used by CBS to authenticate their televised story. These same written images were pressed into service by the Blogosphere to debunk the validity of the very story based upon the authority of those texts themselves. In short, folks clad only in their pajamas and armed only with the power of their PC’s and their nimble brains were able in minutes to determine the illegitimacy of the “documents” upon which five years of Mary Mapes’ career was spent.

How did they do this? Well, as anyone that frequents an Internet forum can tell you—or anyone who has participated in those lively arguments that have been consigned to the waste-bin by the PC Police might also recognize—bad ideas are nearly uniformly recognized and identified publicly; good ideas rise like cream to the top. At FreeRepublic.com, such good ideas are often identified with the shorthand “BTT,” which stands for “Bump to the Top.” The point is, in this situation, CBS was at something of a substantial disadvantage. The Bush Air Guard story had been vetted by only a couple of dozen or so minds over the course of five years (or more). Those minds, for whatever reason, convinced CBS to air the story. Once it hit the Internet, it was scrutinized in real time by (potentially) millions—but certainly by no less than thousands. It did not pass the smell test then and no one has really come forth at CBS or from other quarters to defend the fraud that CBS put on the air that night.

As Turner implied, the newspaper as we know it is the written codification of the authority of the oral. As code, it assumes to itself an authority the oral itself can never claim—since the written does not change. The oral, as anyone who has played “telephone” – or, for that matter, had a conversation – could tell you, changes as it proceeds. But the written also gives up something for all its authority—the give and take, the living nature, of the spoken word. The Internet forum, as illustrated on the night of the 60 Minutes II story, seems to partake of both worlds at once—enjoying the fluidity of real thought in something like real time and the authority of the written word, which itself has the advantage of standing still, to be scanned back and forth, studied, judged, and accepted upon its merits or denied.

What we saw with the CBS fake-memo story was the end of Television’s long (and, historically speaking, very short) monopoly of public opinion.

But anyone who has read Peter J. Boyer’s Who Killed CBS? (Random House, 2001) could have predicted this.

Anyone who has paid attention to the shifting values not only at CBS, but especially at 60 Minutes as well as the Mainstream Media, could have predicted this.

It is perhaps a rich irony that Dan Rather made his name by challenging a President who ultimately resigned as the result of his malfeasance in office. We have now witnessed the Mainstream Media attempt to perpetuate the same kind of fraud on the American public, having appropriated the position of “official voice of truth” from the government—with Dan Rather the central figure in that fraud.

We should be forgiven if we believe that such mistakes were the result of high-minded principle. But how can anyone be blamed for believing that this fiasco is the result of political calculation?

About the Writer: Gregory Borse holds a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, and an MA and BA from the University of Dallas. Dr. Borse, a family man with "a beautiful wife and four beautiful children," enjoys writing, current events, media, politics, and disc golf. Gregory receives e-mail at gregorbo@sbcglobal.net.

Ellie