Wither The Mainstream Media?
In a great column for RealClearPolitics, William Bennett gives a hat tip to LGF: Wither The Mainstream Media?
New Websites with different news and opinion sources emerged over the past few years, sites with names like Powerline, Littlegreenfootballs, HughHewitt.com, and The Corner. They are run by attorneys, professors, former attorneys, former professors, journalists, scholars, and smart, seemingly ordinary citizens, uncrowned by tenure committees, major networks, or print newspapers. And the Dan Rathers of the world had no idea what they were or what their power could do. Many elites are just now beginning to pay attention.
When Dan Rather’s pre-election story (billed as a “scoop”) “proving” that George W. Bush deliberately avoided Vietnam service aired, it took only a matter of hours to determine something was very wrong with that story—not morally wrong, factually wrong. Indeed, as the Websites were asking questions CBS producers should have asked, Dan Rather was sticking to his story—to the point of stating, over a week after his original broadcast, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story.” “Earth to Dan Rather,” one “blogger” wrote, “the story has been broken.” And indeed it had been. Dan Rather just did not know it. But the American people did.