IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Rathergate at 20.

When the film Truth premiered in 2015, only a little over ten years after the events depicted, film critics seemed to take the movie as a historical account. Based on Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty, the film was something else again. It prompted John and me to revisit the story in the Weekly Standard article “Rather shameful.” On Power Line I itemized “problems” with the film in “Lies of Truth.”

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the CBS News broadcast that we helped expose as a fraud in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. I find that even those who vaguely recall the scandal know next to nothing about it. I like to say that we contributed to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News. We foolishly thought that a corner had been turned.

However, Dan Rather lives! He is celebrated as a lion of truth, justice, and the American way. Earlier this year Netflix broadcast a documentary that is illustrative of the continuing descent in which we find ourselves. This is what I wrote about it on Power Line.

When Rathergate broke, even the then-Washington Post-owned Slate in September of 2004 described him as Dan Rather: The anchor as madman. And as Glenn wrote at the time, Rather’s implosion was a reminder not to trust what was being presented by old media (or by an media, for that matter):

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.

Presumably, now that CNN has resurrected the television career of Brian Stelter, one of his favorite guests will return as well. Will Stelter’s new show still be called “Reliable Sources?”

Related: What Dan Rather paved the way for: VDH on A decade of untruth: Adding up the media’s lies about Trump and Biden.