A Brit Gives Us Way Too Much Credit

Like-minded Englishman Bill Howard of Luton, England writes:

May I offer you the most sincere and HUMUNGOUSLY HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS on your sterling work in connection with the current CBS / Memogate / Rather firestorm which has resulted as a direct consequence of your extremely acute observations and analysis.
I believe it is no exagerration to say that you have struck a MAGNIFICENT blow for truth and democracy, and the reverberations of what has happened – and which, by the look of things, is going to get a lot bigger before it dies down – are going to have an incredibly powerful and transformational effect on the worldwide media – let alone just the US media – for many, MANY years to come.
The other great news is that it’s starting to affect OUR media propagandists over here too! There is a new uncertainty in their eyes, voices and demeanour, and you can almost see the culture change sweeping across the entire news media spectrum as the realization slowly dawns upon them that they’re in a new ball game, and that they will never again be able to take our compliance for granted as they have done so easily for the last 30 years or so, here in the UK.
I can honestly say that this whole episode has given me not just a passing feeling of victory combined with newly-uplifted spirits during the last 3 weeks but also a new and genuinely long-term hope for the very future of mankind. At last, humanity has a ready means of putting pathological liars and other disparate evildoers under the collective microscope of blogdom every time they try it again. They are ALL going to think very long and hard before they do something like it again from now on, and the the world is going be a MUCH better place as a consequence.
So, Well Done again chaps – it is just FAN-BLOODY-TASTIC!!!
More power to Powerline and Long May You Continue.

We have gotten so much more credit than we deserve for Rathergate that we are a little embarrassed. Many bloggers have been fact-checking the liberal media for several years, and this was just the last of many instances (if, no doubt, one of the most dramatic) where bloggers have caught them red-handed. But Rathergate did represent a kind of tipping point that made it impossible for traditional media sources to ignore the bloggers or their work. In that sense, we were certainly in the right place at the right time.
Beyond that, of course, we were only one of many sites who contributed to unmasking CBS’s fraud. Buckhead and Free Republic, Bill of INDC, and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs are just a few of the many, many bloggers who contributed to the story.
And the even more fundamental point, which we repeat every time we are interviewed, is that the whole story came from our readers, not from us. We knew little or nothing about any of the relevant facts. We merely collected, sifted and disseminated the hundreds of bits of information that we got from our readers, who were much more well-informed than we were. The credit goes to the medium, which makes this kind of real-time fact-checking possible, not to us.
Having said all that, Bill, we can’t thank you enough for your kind words, and we are delighted to know that Rathergate has had echoes even in the U.K.

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