Best of the Web, take 2

Dear readers, after you have read the article by Mac Owens linked below, please check out Jonathan Last’s “The not-so swift mainstream media” (thanks to reader Amelia for the tip), also from the new issue of the Weekly Standard. Last reviews the development of the story of John Kerry’s Kurtz chronicles over the past weeks with great care. Here’s the beauty part:

[T]he big news on August 6 was that Regnery allowed people to download the “Christmas in Cambodia” section of O’Neill’s book…[and] the new media swung into action. Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Powerline, and other bloggers immediately began investigating the book’s allegations. The blog JustOneMinute was the first to find the 1986 “seared–seared” speech in which Kerry described his memory of being in Cambodia in December 1968. On August 8, Reynolds took his digital camera to the University of Tennessee law library and photographed the section of the Congressional Record with the Kerry speech, further verifying the chapter’s central claim. That same weekend, Al Hunt talked about the Swift boat ad on CNN’s Capital Gang, calling it “some of the sleaziest lies I’ve ever seen in politics.”
Over the next 11 days, an interesting dynamic took hold: Talk-radio and the blog world covered the Cambodia story obsessively. They reported on border crossings during Vietnam and the differences between Swift boats and PBRs. They also found two other instances of Kerry’s talking about his Christmas in Cambodia. Spurred on by the blogs, Fox led the August 9 Special Report with a Carl Cameron story on Kerry’s Cambodia discrepancy.
All the while, traditional print and broadcast media tried hard to ignore the story–even as Kerry officially changed his position on his presence in Cambodia. Then on August 19, Kerry went public with his counter assault against Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and suddenly the story was news. The numbers are fairly striking: Before August 19, the New York Times and Washington Post had each mentioned Swift Boat Veterans for Truth just 8 times; the Los Angeles Times 7 times; the Boston Globe 4 times. The broadcast networks did far less. According to the indefatigable Media Research Center, before Kerry went public, ABC, CBS, and NBC together had done a total of 9 stories on the Swifties. For comparison, as of August 19 these networks had done 75 stories on the accusation that Bush had been AWOL from the National Guard.
After Kerry, the deluge. On August 24, the Washington Post ran three op-eds and an editorial on the Swifties; other papers expanded their coverage as well. But, curiously, they didn’t try to play catch-up with the new media in ascertaining the veracity of the Swifties’ claims. Instead, they pursued (or rather, repeated) the charge Kerry made: that Bush was behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It was a touch surreal–as it would have been if Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe’s criticism of Bush’s National Guard record had prompted the media to investigate Terry McAuliffe.
But even here, it seemed their hearts weren’t in it. In Time magazine, Joe Klein called the whole affair “incendiary nonsense.” As the Los Angeles Times observed in an editorial, “Whether the Bush campaign is tied to the Swift boat campaign in the technical, legal sense that triggers the wrath of the campaign-spending reform law is not a very interesting question.” As last week wore on, the coverage continued to ignore the specifics of the allegations against Kerry and began to concentrate on the dangers of the new media. In the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley warned that in the seedy world of cable news, “facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together on screen like laundry in an industrial dryer–without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.” It is perhaps impolite to note that it took the Times nearly four months to catch up with the reporting Carl Cameron did in the beginning of May.
STILL, the baying of the Times and the rest of the old media is a sign of capitulation. Against their will, the best-funded and most prestigious journalists in America have been forced to cover a story they want no part of–or at the very least, they’ve been compelled to explain why they aren’t covering it. How did this happen? Analyzing how the Swift boat veterans had injected their story into the mainstream media, Adam Nagourney blamed summer. The Swift boat ad buys, he wrote, had “become the subject of television news shows . . . because the advertisements and [Unfit for Command] were released in August, a slow month when news outlets are hungry for any kind of news.”
But Nagourney has it exactly backwards: Even though it was August, network television and most cable news shows stayed away from the Swift boat story for as long as they possibly could.
Instead, James O’Shea is right. An informal network–the new media–has arisen that has the power to push stories into the old media. The combination of talk radio, a publishing house, blogs, and Fox News has given conservatives a voice independent of the old media.
It’s unclear which of these was most critical for bringing the Swift boat story out into the open. Without Unfit for Command, the story would never have had a focal point with readily checkable facts. Talk radio kept the story alive on a daily basis. The blogs served as fact-checkers vetting the story, at least some aspects of it, for credibility and chewing it over enough so that producers and editors who read the blogs could approach it without worrying they were being snookered by black-helicopter nuts. Despite all that, however, no other medium has the reach of television, which is still the only way to move a story from a relatively small audience of news-obsessives to the general public.
Yet the blogosphere has had a particular interest in taking credit for making the Swift boat story pop. Blogs from Instapundit to The Belmont Club to Powerline were reveling in the demise of the old media and heaping scorn upon professional journalists. “I have been both a lawyer/law professor for two decades and a television/radio/print journalist for 15 years of those 20,” Hugh Hewitt blogged. “It takes a great deal more intelligence and discipline to be the former than to be the latter, which is why the former usually pays a lot more than the latter. It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers/law professors like those at Powerline and Instapundit prove to be far more adept at exposing the ‘Christmas-in-Cambodia’ lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists.”
John Hinderaker, one of the bloggers behind Powerline, summed up the mood of the blogosphere by comparing journalism with brain surgery: “A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field,” he said. “But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can’t? Nothing.”

Rocket Man, we knew ye when…

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