Bloggers put bite on Rather

People say believe half of what you see, Son, and none of what you hear ... —Marvin Gaye, "I Heard it Through the Grapevine."

I don't know about you, but to me the fascinating part about this week's fall from grace by CBS News and longtime news anchor Dan Rather is realizing that the watchdog has a watchdog.

If journalism is the fourth estate (after the judicial, executive and legislative estates), you can now add another wing to the mansion — the domain of the bloggers, those diarists who post their journals on the Internet for public consumption.

The term "blog" is a derivative from Weblog, the accepted name of these Internet journals.

Bloggers have proliferated in the past few years, springing up in ever-increasing numbers as the dominance of the World Wide Web continues to grow. The well-known political gossip sheet, "The Drudge Report," could be called a blog, as could "Barry Bonds Timeline," one man's diary about the home run hitter's career, along with real estate information about homes for sale in neighborhoods where Bonds has previously lived (you can look it up).

I have never personally met a blogger, and have to admit I had never heard the term until the past two weeks, when blogging hit CBS and Dan Rather like a Ray Lewis forearm.

It was pro-George Bush bloggers who first began to refute the Sept. 8 report aired by Rather on CBS' "60 Minutes II" that produced memos purportedly written in 1972 by a Texas National Guard commander that said unflattering things about the future president's Guard service, including that he had been suspended for not taking a flight physical.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the memos — other than that they were a complete fabrication.

As the bloggers spelled out only hours after the CBS report, the memos were almost assuredly written on a computer in Microsoft Word, which, along with personal computers and, for that matter, blogging, did not exist in 1972.

Dan Rather and CBS could have found this out if they had checked the memos for authenticity, which is what the bloggers did as soon as CBS posted them on its own Internet site.

So, yes, CBS produced its own nightmare.

Bloggers being bloggers, the network doggedly continued to stand by its story. This was especially true of Rather, who said in light of the initial bloggers' suggestions that the memos might not be authentic, "Those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the heart of it . . . that George Bush . . . failed to satisfy the requirements of his service."