I haven’t posted much on the CBS Guard memos saga because it didn’t seem like there was much more to say. CBS seems to have had the essence of the story right, but allowed itself to get duped by some bad evidence. The White House evidently found it credible, too. The moment the documents hit the Net they were questioned and ultimately discredited. CBS compounded its error by failing to take its critics seriously and adopting a blustery, “we stand by our story” wagon-circling defense.
That’s pretty much it. On the one hand, no one seriously doubts that President Bush obtained his Guard posting through family influence, then used family influence again to bail out on the service he’d signed on for. (Today’s New York Times account puts this story together one more time.) On the other hand, CBS has provided the Bush campaign with a great gift of distraction.
I don’t view this saga as a demonstration of the power of the Internet’s fact-checking multitudes so much as a display of the network’s extended ineptitude. Everyone makes mistakes; professionalism lies not in perfection but in responsibility, responsiveness and openness. CBS’s “we know better” response was the opposite. Dan Rather and his colleagues have now stuck a fork in the tattered remnants of the blue-chip brand name they inherited from Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
What really hurts, for CBS and the rest of the networks’ news operations, is that, at this late date in media history, trust is the only advantage the broadcast networks can claim. They no longer deliver the news faster than rivals, they certainly don’t deliver it in more depth or from more viewpoints or with more style. Their only remaining edge has been a sort of generic, fossilized authority. More people get their news from us than through any other channel, the broadcasters’ unspoken claim went. That makes us the arbiters of the news. And we take that responsibility seriously — you can count on us to get things right.
This claim was always problematic, of course, but it bore enough relationship to the truth, back in the days of Walter Cronkite, that when Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, it actually meant something. Today’s network broadcasters simply glop together the mediasphere’s news judgments into boluses of headlines — and when they try to do original reporting, they slip on banana peels.
I don’t think CBS’s mishandling of the Guard memos story has much to do with left vs. right or Kerry vs. Bush; it’s about the passing of an ancien regime. The twilight of the anchors has been upon us for some time, but with the affair of the memos, the flames are now climbing up Black Rock.
In the end, it feels fitting that “60 Minutes’ ” vaunted TV news operation was taken in through its ignorance of the Selectric-to-software history of typography. The typed word — TV’s achilles’ heel!
Bonus links: Good reading on the subject from Reason’s Jesse Walker and, as always, from Jay Rosen.
Correction 9/21: It appears that, though the “Black Rock” building (a/k/a the CBS Building) is associated in the public mind with the network, it has not actually housed CBS for something like a decade.
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