Podhoretz: The Revolution has begun and thy name is Blogging

Jane's NY Post column was cut for this one from John Podhoretz which describes yesterday's big blog event: the Fisking of CBS:

THE populist revolu tion against the so- called mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush.

What the bloggers and their audiences did was call into profound question the authenticity of four documents proudly trumpeted by CBS News in a much-heralded investigative report on Wednesday night's edition of "60 Minutes" about the president's National Guard service in the early 1970s.

Er, can I just add that I was the blogger who called for some foot to brake action on yesterday's events. Sorry. My bad.

The Minneapolis lawyers who run powerlineblog.com were on the case early. Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to a note left on an Internet bulletin board on the freerepublic.com Web site — the 47th posting on the topic there.

Post No. 47 pointed out that there was something off about these documents from the 1970s: The spacing between the letters and the words was proportional, and only a few IBM electric typewriters could achieve that effect back then.

From there it was off to the races. Once anyone who had had experience writing and typing in the 1970s began examining the documents, it was impossible not to see some weird anachronisms that suggested they had been crafted not on a 1970s typewriter, but using Microsoft Word.

Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderful littlegreenfootballs.com, simply typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word's New Times Roman font and, lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS site, down to the letter spacing.

What was awesome about Charles' simple experiment was that I heard Brit Hume say one of his producers replicated it with the same result. The power of LGF knows know bounds. All hail Charles Johnson and his bicycle which made it all possible!

By 3 o'clock, the very careful and honest Jim Geraghty, who produces invaluable material every day on nationalreview.com's Kerry Spot, was saying flatly, "CBS had better have one heck of a defense for this."

Where are th props for Bill? Yo, Bill is in da house too yo. Dissed.

Ok, so the Rupert Murdoch lackeys over at the Post dissed him, but not the Chicago Sun-Times.

Another blogger, Bill Ardolino at INDC Journal, who had read Powerline, said, "I decided to find a top typeface expert and ran his analysis on my Web site."

Awesome, but why no linky-love in the text of the article? Old media meet new citation method: the URL.

Still reeling from yesterday. Stayed up late to see how the old media covered it. Some good roundups out there of yesterday's happening. Pixy Misa is a good place to start. Possible light posting day.

Posted by: Rusty at 08:15 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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