SCOTT JOHNSON: Looking back at 23 years.
It’s been a while since I took the occasion of Power Line’s anniversary to look back. Borrowing from previous editions, I want to do so again today to highlight themes that continue to resonate with me.
- It was 23 years ago this weekend — 23 years ago today, I think, but maybe tomorrow — that John Hinderaker went to Blogger and set up Power Line. On Memorial Day that weekend he gave me a call and invited me to contribute. We’ve moved on from Blogger, but we’re still here. Survival has its charms; many good sites have come and gone or gone off the deep end over the years.
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On the evening of September 8, 2004, CBS News/60 Minutes II broadcast the inaptly titled report “For the record.” With a little help from Atlanta attorney Harry MacDougald supplemented by information from some knowledgeable readers and fellow writers online, we had a hand in turning the CBS News story into Rathergate. Triggered by the Hollywood version in 2015, John and I looked back on the scandal in the Weekly Standard article “Rather shameful.”
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We made our contribution in part through readers who got us going with information they emailed on the morning of September 9. It is amazing to me in retrospect that we were able to post the initial updates to “The Sixty-First Minute” based on messages from the few thousand regular readers we had at the time. Other readers came that morning from links that directed them to us.
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As we were flooded with emails following the post, I called John mid-morning for help sorting through the messages and assessing the information. John took a look and called me back 15 minutes later. “Dan Rather is toast,” he said. “The key to the case is kerning.” I’m sure John had never heard the word before reviewing the email that morning. With his trial lawyer’s eye, however, he had fastened on powerful proof of the fraud.
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Working for Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart linked to the post early that afternoon with a screaming siren on the Drudge Report. By the end of the day some 500,000 readers had visited the post. Inside CBS News they were trying to figure out what had happened. What had happened was one of the great journalistic frauds of all time, the unraveling of which led to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News.
Read the whole thing.