President Bush, for the first time, is hailing the rise of the alternative media and the decline of the mainstream media, which he now says conspired to harm him with forged documents. I find it interesting that the old way of gathering the news is slowly but surely losing market share, Bush said in an exclusive interview for the new book Strategery. Its interesting to watch these media conglomerates try to deal with the realities of a new kind of world.
| The only problem with that is that us new media depend on the old media to gather the actual raw news. I say good riddance to the pseudonews organs, but there are also real reporters out there, and they should be considered a precious resource. |
For example, journalist Dan Rather was forced out of his anchor chair at CBS News after bloggers revealed he had used forged documents to criticize Bushs military record in September 2004. The forgeries, which Bush now calls a conspiracy, ended up helping his re-election campaign, he acknowledged in the Oval Office interview.
| Bush is merely being accurate in his terminology. It's hard to accidentally forge documents. You can misinterpret, you can be wrong in your analysis, but when it comes to actually typing up what you want to report you're conspiring. By the way, whatever happened to Lucy Ramirez? I was so looking forward to hearing from her. |
It looks like somebody conspired to float false documents, he said. And I was amazed about it.
| "I couldn't believe they'd be that stoopid. Normally, when somebody's hatching that sort of a plot they preserve some sort of plausible deniability. Rather really led with his chin!" |
"I just couldnt believe that would be happening [and] then it would become the basis of a fairly substantial series of news stories.
| "I said, 'Rove, you're a friggin' genius!' Imagine my surprise when he told me they'd done it themselves, without his help!" |
He added: Then there was a backlash to it. I mean, a lot of people were angry that this could have happened. A lot of Americans are fair people and they viewed this as patently unfair. So in a funny way, I guess it inured to our benefit, when it was all said and done.  | "So all I have to say is, 'Thanks, Dan. You really hosed that one, didn't you?' Oh, and a big 'Thanks!' to Mary Mapes, too. Dan couldn't have done it without her help." |
The episode, known as Memogate, inoculated Bush against further scrutiny of his National Guard record for the duration of the presidential campaign. It also, frankly, gave us an opportunity, frequently, when things came out in the media that we didnt believe or didnt like, to say, Its another CBS story, said Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who was the presidents campaign manager. I mean, it gave us a serious response to bad news.
| "Talk about political manna from heaven! We were rollin' in it!" |
Memogate was initially expected to harm the president, but it ended up backfiring spectacularly on the press.  The guy that it hurt most was Dan Rather and the executives at CBS, said White House strategist Karl Rove in an interview for Strategery.
| "Nurse! Bring the oxygen tank! Karl's talking about Rather, and he's lost his breath laughing again!" |
It further disgraced a network which is third in ratings and, if you look at the demographics of their consumers, its like 70 percent Democrat. Rove said Rathers eagerness to broadcast obviously forged documents proves he is no serious reporter. As for Rathers insistence, to this day, that the documents are real, Rove said: Thats really bias.
| "Or maybe wishful thinking. Nobody takes him seriously anymore since he move to Lalaland." |
Memogate has helped accelerate the decline of the mainstream media, generally defined as CBS, NBC,ABC, The New York Times and other establishment news outlets.  There has been a corresponding rise in popularity of the alternative media, which includes free daily newspapers, the Fox News Channel, talk radio, the Drudge Report Web site and a host of Web logs, or blogs.
| Keep in mind that with the partial exception of Fox News, all of those sources use raw news provided by AP, AFP, Rooters, and UPI. Even when we're mining the foreign press, much of what we bring back we could have taken from the day's wire service story. Asharq al-Aswat, KUNA, Beirut Daily Star, and Pak Daily Times actually carry news before it hits the wires, but if we didn't mine them most of what we carry would eventually end up there, if a bit garbled. |
 I think whats healthy is that theres no monopoly on the news, Bush said. Theres competition. Theres competition for the attention of, you know, 290 million people, or whatever it is. And the amazing thing about this world we live in is that theres a kind of free-flowing, kind of bulletin board of ideas and thoughts out there in the ether space, sometimes landing on somebodys desk and sometimes not, but always available. Its a very interesting period. Having long been pilloried by the mainstream media, Bush now finds the rise of the alternative media nothing less than revolutionary. Its the beginning of the 21st century; it also happens to be the beginning of or near the beginning of a revolution in newsgathering and dissemination, he said. Not
in newsmaking that tends to be pretty consistent.
| Translating the hodge-podge of press releases that are the raw material of most news becomes the hard part. Even as a hardworking member of the alternative media, I don't have that much patience. I could maybe handle the part about hanging around the bar in a hotel in Baghdad drinking gin and tonic, and maybe the part about occasionally riding around with the infantry and taking notes, but not the press releases." |
Rove considers Memogate a watershed in the rise of the alternative media.
| "That was where an entire industry shot itself in the foot and then ignored the bleeding. It was wonderful!" |
The whole incident in the fall of 2004 showed, really, the power of the blogosphere, he said in his West Wing office.
| Charles Johnson, take a bow! |
Because in essence, you had now an army of self-pointed experts looking over the shoulder of the mainstream media and bringing to bear enormously sophisticated skills. Still, Rove cautioned that the Internets political potential has a darker side. There is so much ugliness and viciousness and fundamental untruths that the blogosphere transmits, he lamented. It also is a vehicle for ugly rumors, for scurrilous personal attacks, an avenue for the creation of urban legends which are deeply corrosive of the political system and of peoples faith in it.
| Simple solution: if they don't source their stuff, you can ignore them. There's no reason bloggers should be held to a lower standard than the mainstream press. A fair bloc of it holds to a rather higher standard, and hopefully will continue to do so. Given time, the sourced version like Rantburg, but also like LGF, Roger Simon, Donald Sensing, Belmont Club, Bill Quick, Kathy Kinsley, Glenn Reynolds, and hundreds of others, will stand in contrast to the fairy tale venom sites. Drudge takes a lot of heat for his occasional inaccuracies, but his stuff looks pretty good when compared to some of the corkers that have appeared in the MSM, quite aside from the obviously egregious Rathergate affair. |
 Rove said Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, were gunning for the president and trying to help his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by broadcasting the forged documents in the heat of the presidential campaign. From her body language and his body language, their enthusiasm for this story was in large measure fed by the belief that they were playing a constructive and perhaps determinative role in the presidential campaign, Rove said of Mapes and Rather. They made a decision in this instance I think quite prematurely and quite unfairly to pursue a story that attacked the president. And I thought it was, to me, one of the most incredible examples of how fundamentally unfair it was.
| "Then it blew up in their faces. It wasn't one of those little blowups that you can explain away, a few bits of egg on your face but your dignity still intact. This was the big blowup, where the entire nation was watching while a handful of bloggers pulled their pants down and shoved them over in the schoolyard. Not only did they get dirt rubbed in their faced, but the bloggers made 'em cry. Kinda makes you just smack your lips and say "Yes! There is a God! And one of his commandments is not to bear false witness! And he does have a sense of humor!' |
Rove expressed astonishment that CBS ignored the warnings of document experts hired by the network to authenticate the National Guard memos. It goes back to the failure of the mainstream media, in this instance, to honor their own experts, he said. Rove is not the only senior Bush adviser who considers the mainstream media biased against the conservative president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was outraged that the TV networks refused to declare Bush the winner on Election Night, even after all the votes were counted in the pivotal state of Ohio and it became obvious Kerry could not win. Some of the talking heads, Card said, were rooting for a crisis in Ohio. It wasnt just that they were afraid to admit we had won. Card became particularly incensed when Bushs Ohio lead reached 120,000 votes, which was mathematically insurmountable. Nobody wanted to call it so that we had won, he said. It was like,
cmon,are they just afraid to say it? |
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Key Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have united to call on President Bush to begin pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, citing an overtaxed military, billions of dollars spent and ongoing sectarian violence. In a letter to Bush released Monday, the Democrats backed a plan for the "phased redeployment" of troops. "U.S. forces in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces and force protection of U.S. personnel," the Democrats wrote.
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