NOTE: I’ve updated this post to include an apology to Eric Muller. I didn’t intend my — entirely justified — slam at Dave Neiwert’s cheap shots to reflect on Muller’s scholarship, but it sounded that way. He got caught in the crossfire, and I’ve apologized for that.
Archive for 2004
September 14, 2004
DARFUR UPDATE:
13 SEPTEMBER 2004 | GENEVA — A mortality survey has just been conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Sudan’s Ministry of Health in two of the States in Sudan’s Darfur region. It concludes that death rates amongst internally displaced people still surpass the threshold for a humanitarian emergency, underscoring the need for urgent increases in, and focus on, assistance to displaced people in the region.
1.2 million people in Darfur region have fled their villages and are camped in 129 settlements across an area the size of France. The “crude mortality rate” that is usually used to define a humanitarian crisis is one death per 10 000 people per day. The WHO survey found the crude mortality rate to be 1.5 deaths per 10 000 people per day in North Darfur, and 2.9 in West Darfur. The survey looked at overall deaths and their causes between 15 June and 15 August 2004. Results show that displaced people, in North and West Darfur are dying at between three and six times the expected rate.
Meanwhile, Sunday’s UN protest doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention outside the blogosphere.
When I first wrote about this on Thursday, in a column that appeared on Friday, it seemed likely but not certain they were phony. We called the column “CBS’ Big Blunder?” with a question mark just to be careful.
There’s no need to pull any punches now. I’m going to be blunt here: Anybody who spends an hour reviewing the evidence and the expert testimony knows they’re forgeries.
The discrediting has gone on now for five straight days. The conclusion isn’t just overwhelming, it’s inarguable.
The documents aren’t just forgeries, they’re bad, blatant, ludicrous forgeries. They’re forgeries so easily detected that in the space of a few hours after CBS released computer photographs of them on the Internet, they had already been pegged and deconstructed.
Then there’s this:
News has always been a dog-eat-dog business. The blogosphere just makes it more so, and with a nonstop feeding schedule. CBS’s problem is, they seem to be determined to act like a Milk-Bone™ instead of a dog.
Meanwhile this Washington Post story just tightens the screws:
The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush’s former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer’s signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.
“There’s no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them,” Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are “copies” that are “far removed” from the originals.
A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush’s National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.
The analysis shows that half a dozen Killian memos released earlier by the military were written with a standard typewriter using different formatting techniques from those characteristic of computer-generated documents. CBS’s Killian memos bear numerous signs that are more consistent with modern-day word-processing programs, particularly Microsoft Word. . . .
Of more than 100 records made available by the 147th Group and the Texas Air National Guard, none used the proportional spacing techniques characteristic of the CBS documents. Nor did they use a superscripted “th” in expressions such as “147th Group” and or “111th Fighter Intercept Squadron.”
Ouch. Read the whole thing, which is just devastating — though not really news to people who have been reading blogs.
UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein is hearing things.
September 13, 2004
DASCHLE IS 3 POINTS BEHIND THUNE in this South Dakota poll: though that’s within the margin of error, making it a statistical tie. Can’t be making him happy, though.
PUTIN’S POWER GRAB: Joe Gandelman has a troubling post.
OUTSOURCING JOBS MEANS PROFIT at The New York Times.
TOM MAGUIRE SAYS that the press seems to be AWOL.
MEDIENKRITIK is remembering the Hitler diaries scandal.
UPDATE: Different historical perspective, from Gerard van der Leun.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Semi-related post by LaShawn Barber.
IT’S A SPECIAL ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN EXPIRATION EDITION of Alphecca’s usual weekly media gun report.
I notice that Kerry was making a lot of noise about the Assault Weapons ban expiring, after being very quiet on the subject until recently, and after trying — albeit ineffectually — to burnish his pro-gun credentials as recently as last week.
I take this as a sign that the Kerry campaign now expects to lose, and has shifted to a rally-the-base mode intended to protect downticket candidates. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s how it looks to me. More evidence here.
It’s also worth reading Dave Kopel’s take on the AWB expiration, and this piece by Timothy Wheeler.
UPDATE: An, er, alternate theory of what Kerry’s about, here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jacob Sullum says that Kerry has played a constructive role: “As the federal ‘assault weapon’ ban expires, we can thank John Kerry for demonstrating the stupidity of targeting firearms based on features that have nothing to do with their lethality or their suitability for crime.”
ZELL MILLER responds to his critics.
William Safire’s column in the New York Times concerning CBS’ and Rather’s credibility collapse is the equivalent of an intervention performed by friends and colleagues on a substance abuser.
Interventions don’t always work. Wait and see.
We will.
THANK YOU, DAN RATHER: 385,000 PAGEVIEWS on Friday.
VIRGINIA POSTREL ON BLOGGERS AND EDITORS:
What CBS has learned over the past few days is that its editors aren’t good enough. Nowadays when stories go public, they get checked by after-the-fact editors with expertise in every field imaginable, and that checking gets published to the entire world via the blogosphere. Bloggers may not have editors, but they serve as editors themselves.
What’s so devastating for CBS is that it didn’t make an esoteric mistake, requiring rare expertise. It made a boneheaded mistake on a big story. It’s my professional opinion that any decent journalist over 30 years old would have immediately suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1972. In fact, any decent journalist over 30 would have suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1982. (That year, I paid The Daily Princetonian $20 to cover the film cost of a resume that looked like what you can dash off on Microsoft Word; it was produced on an expensive compositing system by a graphics professional.) That those memos managed to get on national television without a caveat about their reliability suggests a complete breakdown of both journalistic instincts and journalistic process.
You shouldn’t need bloggers to catch errors like this. But it helps.
And read this, too. The Seinfeld point had occurred to me, though in a slightly different connection.
BEST OF THE WEB has more on RatherGate.
FAMED BLOG-COMMENTER SHANNON LOVE now has her own blog.
CAYMAN HURRICANE NEWS: Reader Mark Odiorne sends this:
Communications with Cayman are sporadic, but it seems text messaging works if both ends have a Cayman issued phone from AT&T or DigiCell. The word getting out is not good. While we are still trying to get word about the status of our own people (we have an office there) what we have heard is that there is extensive damage, much from the storm surge. The North Sound surge met up with the surge from South Sound and from the west/7Mile.
Two sites that have been posting what updates they can gather are:
Thanks for being a good friend of Cayman, always like seeing you mention it on the blog. We can all hope and pray that you’ll have some good news to post in the coming months and years!
I may have to schedule a fact-finding tour soon.
UPDATE: If you’re in the Miami area and want to help, click “read more.”
JAMES LILEKS joins the happy gang of pajama-bloggers with this highly amusing illustration.
But all fun aside, I think there are some important lessons for Big Media — and for everyone else — in the rise of the blogosphere. They stem from the fact that bloggers operate on the Internet, where arguments from authority are difficult since nobody knows whether you’re a dog.
In short, it’s the difference between high-trust and low-trust environments.
The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn’t ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn’t fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I’m not sure. It’s not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.)
The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.
That’s because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.
(This is actually a lot like the world lawyers live in — nobody trusts us enough to take our word for, well, much of anything, so we back things up with lots of footnotes, citations, and exhibits. Legal citation systems are even like a primitive form of hypertext, really, one that’s been around for six or eight hundred years. But I digress — except that this perhaps explains why so many lawyers take naturally to blogging).
You can also refine your arguments, updating — and even abandoning them — in realtime as new facts or arguments appear. It’s part of the deal.
This also means admitting when you’re wrong. And that’s another difference. When you’re a blogger, you present ideas and arguments, and see how they do. You have a reputation, and it matters, but the reputation is for playing it straight with the facts you present, not necessarily the conclusions you reach. And a big part of the reputation’s component involves being willing to admit you’re wrong when you present wrong facts, and to make a quick and prominent correction.
When you’re a news anchor, you’re not just putting your arguments on the line — you’re putting yourself on the line. Dan Rather has a problem with that. For journalists of his generation, admitting an error means admitting that you’ve violated people’s trust. For bloggers, admitting an error means you’ve missed something, and now you’re going to set it right.
What people in the legacy media need to ask themselves is, which approach is more likely to retain credibility over time? I think I know the answer. I think Dan Rather does, too.
UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt makes an interesting point, which is that the smaller blogs — because they’re mostly read by friends and acquaintances of the bloggers — may actually operate in a high-trust environment: “Sure, a few hundred blogs seem to own a large share of the traffic, as N.Z.Bear’s rankings by traffic shows. But there are tens of thousands of blogs each racking up unique visitors. If those blogs in the tail pick up a meme –say, “Dan Rather is a doddering fool and CBS is covering up for him”– its spread across the universe of people using the web for information gathering is huge and almost instantaneous. And irreversible because a friend or colleague of Rick is much more likely to believe his analysis because he knows and trusts Rick than . . . some knucklehead from CBS who is attempting to dismiss Rick as a pajama-wearing loon.”
Good point. I hadn’t thought that through. See — it’s Mickey Kaus’s “asymptotic approach to truth” in action!
ANOTHER UPDATE: These thoughts on Old Media and secrecy are worth reading, too.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader writes to say that I’m no pajama-blogger, and she’s got proof! Okay, my secret is out. (Hey, Shannon Love is right about the Internet and secrecy!) Like Charles Johnson, I find that proper attire makes my blogging far more credible. Happy, Mr. Klein?
Of course, you could have seen me in drawstring cotton pants and an “Amelia Island” t-shirt if you’d been spying on me this morning. I guess that counts as pajama-blogging.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
I THINK THE ANSWER IS “BECAUSE YOU WERE SCAMMED:”
“We’re having a hard time tracking how we got the documents,” says the CBS News producer. “There are at least two people in this building who have insisted we got copies of these memos from the Kerry campaign by way of an additional source. We do not have the originals, and our sources have indicated to us that we will not be getting the originals. How that is possible I don’t know.”
Just a thought.
KERRY SAYS CRIME IS UP: DoJ says crime is down.
TOM MAGUIRE is correcting Daniel Okrent. He’s also looking into the mystery of Kerry’s military records.
JIM MILLER offers advice for Big Media on how to use blogs to make their work better.
It’s worth reading this column from a while ago, too.
THERE’S NOW A WEBSITE, called RatherGate.Com, tracking the CBS forged-documents allegations.
MORE ON DAN RATHER AND CBS, from The Baltimore Sun:
Any news organization broadcasting or publishing potentially highly charged reports – particularly in an election year – must make sure the information is accurate and that the public understands why it can be believed, said experienced reporters.
“That’s the kind of thing that you really have to do when you have a controversial topic – endless shoe-leather [reporting],” said Donald L. Barlett, half of a prize-winning investigative reporting team for Time magazine. “That kind of work just takes a lot of time. There are no shortcuts.”
There is a particularly heavy responsibility for news organizations that rely upon anonymous sources, reporters said. Typically, any news organization that grants anonymity to a source will then go to exceptional lengths to keep that promise. “We’re going to protect our source, every way we can,” CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said yesterday.
But the genesis of the information can provide valuable clues in evaluating its worth. “If this came from somebody who was inside the Pentagon records center and said, ‘Here’s some documents,’ then it’s better than somebody who’s a partisan Democrat,” said Ross of ABC. “Your level of skepticism would rise, the more a person has to gain.”
“I’ve never thought that simply relying on a source got you off the hook for your own credibility,” said Brooks Jackson, a former investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal and CNN. Jackson now runs FactCheck.org, a Web site dedicated to reviewing claims made by politicians. . . .
Barlett of Time said yesterday that he and his partner, James B. Steele, had two rules of thumb when evaluating documents of uncertain provenance. First, he said, they consult, at minimum, three or four analysts with expertise in typewriting or handwriting. Second, they would not consider documents that were “10th generation” – that is, photocopied so many times that they could not be credibly examined.
As I noted below, even if by some miracle CBS manages to convince people that these documents aren’t frauds, its lapse in professional standards in bringing them forward without more proof of reliability is unforgivable.
Stefan Sharkansky has some observations, including this one: “This failure of credibility at CBS can only magnify doubts about the credibility of other media outlets. . . . The knives are beginning to appear.”
And the pajamas!
Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty offers a righteous Fisking of Rather’s on-air defense, showing just how thin and dishonest it was.
And — speaking of magnifying doubts about credibility! — the Cincinnati Post looks absolutely clueless, publishing this editorial on the documents today that doesn’t even mention their problems. How lame is that?
UPDATE: The Cincinnati Post editorial seems to have been taken down. Hmm.