Pyrrhic victories
I have a theory that I'm not really interested enough in to test. It was brought to mind by Ben Wasserman's pretty decent analysis of Conservative blog celebrations of the death of "old media."
First, it's worth remembering how many other news stories — basically, er, all of them — have not been broken by the blogosphere. The obvious analogue to the suspicious memos about Bush's National Guard service was last month's spurious attacks on Kerry's military service in Vietnam. Though decried by leftie bloggers, the charges were not adequately debunked until newspapers like the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune reaped the reward from Freedom of Information Act searches of decades-old military records and published eyewitness testimonials. Old-fashioned reporting won that round.
For a number of reasons, the CBS memos were the blogosphere's perfect target: If any news story was going to be broken by bloggers, it was this. As with the Lott affair, "breaking" this story meant pointing attention to something that aired on television. (Lott's comments were broadcast on C-SPAN.) It was commentary on a news story, not a news story of its own. Leaving the house or making phone calls was not part of getting the scoop.
Furthermore, conservatives, especially the blogging kind, had fulminated all day about the latest slew of old-media stories about Bush's Guard service even as "60 Minutes" hyped its story. A skeptical right-wing audience was ready to pounce on whatever Rather threw at them. Even before the piece aired, for example, the Republican National Committee's website posted a heavily linked-to "Research Briefing" about the segment's interview subject: "Who is Ben Barnes? A Deep-Pocketed Kerry Partisan Who Can't Keep His Stories Straight."
Also, CBS posted images of the memos on its website, as did many other news organizations. The story's primary sources were right there on the Internet. Although font experts weighed in with sometimes helpful, sometimes contradictory assertions about the documents' credibility, no one could dispute one of the bloggers' greatest pieces of circumstantial evidence against the memos: the discovery that retyping the memos using Times New Roman font and default formatting in Microsoft Word produced a nearly identical document. Pretty suspicious for something supposedly typed 30 years ago.
In short, the CBS story was broadcast into bloggers' living rooms at a time when a subset of the blogosphere was waiting for it, and was primed to rip holes in it. The primary evidence was posted on the Internet. And the most persuasive investigative technique was a word processing program.
In the days that followed, newspapers and television programs moved the story along by cross-checking the memos against contemporaneous National Guard records, interviewing witnesses and family members, and again questioning the network's experts. The blogs picked up the story, but they couldn't carry it to the finish line alone. They were complemented by traditional media but never came close to supplanting it.
The bloggers who first cast doubt on the CBS memos deserve congratulations, gratitude and, of course, their time in the sun. This has been another moment of triumph for this dynamic and emerging field, and it will surely not be the last. But it has been a moment, not a revolution.
The guys that carried this forward were Powerline, Little Green Footballs and Free Republic, right? They're getting a lot of press for this, and you know what happens when political blogs get respectable commentary in the major media. They get BIG bumps in traffic.
These guys will be the face of Conservative blogs for a lot of new readers.
Now, I'm not actually familiar with Powerline but I am familiar with LGF and the Freepers, and I know some pretty vile stuff slops around in those forums on occasion. As a result, I don't think they will see permanent increases in traffic from this.
