Dan Rather finds himself in a struggle over forged memos. In the face of a preponderance of evidence against him, Rather stands like a stone wall, declaring his documents to be genuine and his reporting to be accurate. This incident is one in a continuing conflict that is being described in terms of Mainstream Media vs. the Bloggers. To be sure those are the players, but that's not really the conflict.
It's really still the same fight that's been going on for about the last hundred years, between the left, who favor government controls and planned economies, and the right, who favor limited government and free markets. The battle is fought with ideas and until very recently, up until about 1980, the left has had the clear advantage. They surged to the lead by successfully winning a majority of professorships and taking control of academia. Academia teaches acceptable thought. Academia seeks to suppress or discredit unacceptable thought.
Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw described the state of much of academia with his famous quip, "Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach." While those with a rightward tilt went out into the world to seek their fortunes, the left sought to change the world to something closer to their liking. That would be a world where one doesn't have to try quite so hard to be a success, a world where proper compensation for the more valuable vocations - theirs - can be decided upon by a just and thoughtful government, instead of left to those impersonal and cruel market forces. For as the left knows, market forces are manipulated by those evil corporations.
So they taught varying flavors of socialism, churning out generations of true believers. And those true believers established a new beachhead of their own, continuing to spread the gospel over the airwaves and in the newsprint. Today the journalism business is dominated by those who favor more government control. But cracks are appearing. Fair and balanced Fox News strays from liberal orthodoxy and is branded "right wing" for its heresy. But another and perhaps more serious challenge to the left arises with people who have computers. Those would be the bloggers.
Discrediting an opposing view is much more likely to succeed when you can suppress evidence that might support it. In the old days, this was pretty easily done. Take the case of Walter Duranty, New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer while withholding from the world the story of millions starving to death in the Ukraine. That was an unfortunate little news tidbit. It didn't support his world view, in which Stalin's communism was a sparkling success, so he simply ignored all that death, treating it as insignificant in the face of his higher truth.
For the left, words also take on new meanings. Freedom may no longer mean free to choose. It becomes freedom from want, or freedom from hardship, or freedom from responsibility. Rights take on new meanings, too. John Anderson running as a 1980 third party presidential candidate in support of abortion rights declared, that "every baby has the right to be wanted." If it occurred to him a baby might have the right to be alive, he didn't mention it. Not one of the choices.
The words and ideas of the left don't stand up that well in the face of accurate information. And that's what the bloggers bring, accurate information. Sure, there are those out there that bring inaccurate information, but the accurate information survives. The truth will out.
I'm certain Dan Rather never dreamed the printed pages in his possession would ever be questioned. Splash them across the screen in front of a few million viewers and the story is made. Five or ten years ago it would have been unthinkable that anyone would get more than a fleeting glimpse. But this past week a few thousand of those viewers hopped on the internet and scrutinized those pages, bringing a combined expertise to the task that makes the experts on Rather's CBS look a little sickly. They picked apart the 30 year old documents and brought in their verdict - fraud. It was Microsoft Word, not a 1973 vintage typewriter that created those memos.
In today's world the information will find its way out, because people have computers and computers are connected to the internet. Information that the Walter Durantys and Dan Rathers of the world were once able to suppress is right there where everybody can see it and examine it in minute detail. If the underlying information is not there, the story and the journalist are suspect. In the internet age it becomes more difficult for a journalist to say something happened that didn't, or to hide something that did. Technology is working to the advantage of the right, because it's in the interest of the right to get more information out, while the left must hope to suppress. If you think that's not true reflect for a moment on the New York Times' coverage of Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia. Or perhaps Kerry's full military records, or Kerry's medical records. Think about Duranty.
The left will survive this round. Staggered and wobbly, they'll make it to the bell. But they've been getting smacked around pretty good, lately. Their prejudices and bigotries are showing, because everything is getting put out where everybody can see it. Right out there on the internet where an army of bloggers will examine it from about as many perspectives as there are bloggers. Not good for the left.
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