The Power of Blogs
Wired Magazine is running quite an interesting article about the power of blogs on the media. The background of the story is President Bush's background regarding his time served in the military.
It apparently happened when some one writer at Wired "clicked through cable TV channels the other night looking for something (anything) to watch" and came across "two guys sparring over "Memogate." Had CBS News' twangy elder, Dan Rather, fallen for phony memos that purported to show that President George W. Bush received preferential treatment and failed to fulfill his National Guard duty some 30 years ago?
Keeping with cable news custom, one guest was there to attack CBS, the other to defend Rather. Unfortunately, the writer only caught the tail end of their prickly exchange.
But when the CBS apologist was asked about the role bloggers played in propelling the story to national scandal, he dismissed them as little more than journalist-wannabes, sitting in their underwear in front of their PCs, typing whatever thoughts/opinions/rants they had between trips to the refrigerator. "
The story behind that all was that "on Sept. 9, Dan Rather, moonlighting on 60 Minutes II, claimed that then-Lt. Bush grabbed a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard by leaping past hundreds of applicants on a waiting list, and, once there, failed to meet minimum performance standards.
Rather relied heavily on copies of documents signed by Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush's National Guard commander. Of particular note was an Aug. 19, 1973, memo in which Killian complained of pressure to "sugarcoat" a Bush performance review after the future president skipped a required flight physical."
Apparently, bloggers immediately reported about possible mistakes on the memo - saying that the memo is written in Times Roman - something only introduced later by Microsoft, or a superscripted "th" character after numbers like 19; the fact that memos listed a post office box and not a valid street address; the use of certain nonstandard National Guard abbreviations."
Well, Dan Rather dismissed the story and the bloggers as professional rumuor mill and that bloggers might not have the right motivation.
Anyway - the story didn't die down. Bloggers functioned as media control, checking the accuracy of a document that would have become way more important in course of the presidential elections. In fact, they functioned as a balance of power to a pretty centralised media coverage. And that is good - it shows that there is another sphere that is under attack by a fast changing, still evolving and uncontrollable medium - the internet and the millions of people out there that make themselves heard.
The interesting piece is that
It apparently happened when some one writer at Wired "clicked through cable TV channels the other night looking for something (anything) to watch" and came across "two guys sparring over "Memogate." Had CBS News' twangy elder, Dan Rather, fallen for phony memos that purported to show that President George W. Bush received preferential treatment and failed to fulfill his National Guard duty some 30 years ago?
Keeping with cable news custom, one guest was there to attack CBS, the other to defend Rather. Unfortunately, the writer only caught the tail end of their prickly exchange.
But when the CBS apologist was asked about the role bloggers played in propelling the story to national scandal, he dismissed them as little more than journalist-wannabes, sitting in their underwear in front of their PCs, typing whatever thoughts/opinions/rants they had between trips to the refrigerator. "
The story behind that all was that "on Sept. 9, Dan Rather, moonlighting on 60 Minutes II, claimed that then-Lt. Bush grabbed a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard by leaping past hundreds of applicants on a waiting list, and, once there, failed to meet minimum performance standards.
Rather relied heavily on copies of documents signed by Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush's National Guard commander. Of particular note was an Aug. 19, 1973, memo in which Killian complained of pressure to "sugarcoat" a Bush performance review after the future president skipped a required flight physical."
Apparently, bloggers immediately reported about possible mistakes on the memo - saying that the memo is written in Times Roman - something only introduced later by Microsoft, or a superscripted "th" character after numbers like 19; the fact that memos listed a post office box and not a valid street address; the use of certain nonstandard National Guard abbreviations."
Well, Dan Rather dismissed the story and the bloggers as professional rumuor mill and that bloggers might not have the right motivation.
Anyway - the story didn't die down. Bloggers functioned as media control, checking the accuracy of a document that would have become way more important in course of the presidential elections. In fact, they functioned as a balance of power to a pretty centralised media coverage. And that is good - it shows that there is another sphere that is under attack by a fast changing, still evolving and uncontrollable medium - the internet and the millions of people out there that make themselves heard.
The interesting piece is that
posted by Andreas @ 12:08 pm
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