Low Overhead LGF

Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 7:25:55 am PDT

I’ve temporarily set up a stripped down version of our LGF template, anticipating a surge of traffic today as the CBS forgery story spreads across mainstream media.

John Fund has a good piece about the scandal at OpinionJournal.

If it turns out that the Killian memos are indeed forgeries, the Internet will have played an invaluable role in exposing the fraud much faster than the 18 months Mr. Camacho had to twist in the wind. Free Republic, a Web bulletin board, raised early warning signals about the memos within hours of last Wednesday’s “60 Minutes” broadcast. Powerlineblog.com, a site run by three lawyers, reposted those comments, which were amplified by indcjournal.com. Then design expert Charles Johnson, who blogs at littlegreenfootballs.com, retyped one of the memos using Microsoft Word and showed them to be a perfect typographic match.

A defensive Dan Rather went on the air Friday to complain of what he called a “counterattack” from “partisan political operatives.” In reality, traditional journalism now has a new set of watchdogs in the “blogosphere.” In the words of blogger Mickey Kaus, they can trade information and publicize it “fast enough to have real-world consequences.” Sure, blogs can be transmission belts for errors, vicious gossip and last-minute disinformation efforts. But they can also correct themselves almost instantaneously—in sharp contrast with CBS’s stonewalling.